Haggai's TiddlyQuotes (BrainGrains) — When insights need capturing, quotes (often) come in very handy. (as opposed to the quote: When ideas fail, words come in very handy.)

This TiddlyWiki contains the following tiddlers:

'I shall deal with the matter momentarily,’ he said. It was a good word. It always made people hesitate. They were never quite sure whether he meant he’d deal with it now, or just deal with it briefly. And no-one ever dared ask.
‘No,’ is a complete sentence.
'Real magic,' refers to the magic that is not real; while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic.
'wet streets cause rain' stories
‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ ‘Kind.’
"How do you decide when to struggle against injustice and when to devote yourself to private projects of self-creation?" This question strikes liberal ironists as just as hopeless as the questions "Is it right to deliver n innocents over to be tortured to save the lives of m x n other innocents? If so, what are the correct values of m and n?" or the question "When may one favor members of one's family, or one's community, over other, randomly chosen, human beings?"
"I distinctly remember a discussion in class about the possibility of modeling the universe as a cellular automaton." "Wouldn’t it be awfully slow?" "How fast do you want it to be?” “One second per second."
"The sentient puddle" parable
"Tragic optimism" - the human potential in light of the "tragic triad" of pain, guilt, and death
(about the I:) Without It, man cannot live. But he who lives with It alone is not a man.
(As you grow older) you realize that life is an ever-narrowing conveyor belt. Slowly, inexorably, it takes us all along with it, and one by one we tumble off the sides of the conveyor belt into darkness.
(Even a mathematical) proof, in the end, is something that convinces the reader of things being true. And whether the proof is understandable and beautiful depends not only on the proof but also on the reader: What do you know? What do you like? What do you find obvious?
(In older stories) gods created people so that they would serve their Creators—build their temples, grow their food. “There is nothing exalted in this, no thought of enchanting these nameless drudges with the beauty of the world,” Robinson writes. In Genesis, by contrast, humankind is made in God’s image; all the sublimity of biblical Creation seems to be meant for its benefit. We move from gods indifferent to our well-being to a God obsessively focused on us.
(On the road to wisdom) The first lesson, and the last, is 'Do what is needful. And no more!' The lessons in between consist in learning what is needful. One must consider the Balance. But when the Balance itself is broken—then one considers other things. Above all, haste.
[Putting things in writing is a way] to set the record straight -- or at least firmly crooked.
[Religion stems from] the feeling or consciousness of man that he does not and cannot exist apart from a being that is distinct from himself, that he does not have himself to thank for his own existence.
$:/build
$:/config/DefaultSidebarTab
$:/config/DownloadSaver/AutoSave
$:/config/Manager/Show
$:/config/Manager/Tag
$:/config/PageControlButtons/Visibility/$:/core/ui/Buttons/advanced-search
$:/config/PageControlButtons/Visibility/$:/core/ui/Buttons/close-all
$:/config/PageControlButtons/Visibility/$:/core/ui/Buttons/fold-all
$:/config/PageControlButtons/Visibility/$:/core/ui/Buttons/home
$:/config/PageControlButtons/Visibility/$:/core/ui/Buttons/import
$:/config/PageControlButtons/Visibility/$:/core/ui/Buttons/manager
$:/config/PageControlButtons/Visibility/$:/core/ui/Buttons/palette
$:/config/PageControlButtons/Visibility/$:/core/ui/Buttons/tag-manager
$:/config/PageControlButtons/Visibility/$:/core/ui/Buttons/theme
$:/config/PageControlButtons/Visibility/$:/core/ui/Buttons/timestamp
$:/config/PageControlButtons/Visibility/$:/core/ui/Buttons/unfold-all
$:/config/RelinkOnRename
$:/config/TimestampDisable
$:/config/Toolbar/ButtonClass
$:/config/WikiParserRules/Inline/wikilink
$:/core
$:/core/ui/SearchResults
$:/core/ui/ViewTemplate/subtitle
$:/DefaultTiddlers
$:/isEncrypted
$:/macros/hmark/comparequote.js
$:/palette
$:/SiteSubtitle
$:/SiteTitle
$:/state/edit/references--1601774274
$:/state/edit/references-1231583333
$:/state/edit/references-1817180842
$:/state/http-requests
$:/state/sidebar
$:/state/tab/moresidebar-1850697562
$:/state/tab/sidebar--595412856
$:/status/RequireReloadDueToPluginChange
$:/status/UserName
$:/StoryList
$:/theme
$:/themes/tiddlywiki/snowwhite
$:/themes/tiddlywiki/vanilla
14 - Meaning and Purpose
14 - Meaning and Purpose - summary
A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.
A belief in reincarnation would at least give us some slack; we would have many lifetimes to get it right.
A bit early to say.
A Black Belt is just a white belt that never gave up.
A Buddhist monk to a hot-dog seller: Make me one with everything.
A Buddhist nun went into a bookstore.
A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station…
A cause may be inconvenient, but it's magnificent. It's like champagne or high heels, and one must be prepared to suffer for it.
A clock may chime only twice a day and still be very useful
A common stereotype of statisticians is that they are people who chose their profession because they couldn't stand the excitement of accounting.
A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer’s idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world ... The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer’s spells.
A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.
A course is a living thing. The more you teach it, the more refined it becomes. And if you’re fortunate enough to have enough times, enough chances to engage with it, you know it can get really beautifully refined simply by the act of doing it.
A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past; he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.
A disciplined life is not a cold or rigid one. As the waves of sentiment wash up on the shore and then - unresponded to - wash away again, we find not flatness of feeling, but depth of emotion, the ocean that underlies the waves.
A dying man needs to die as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong as well as useless to resist.
A faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it.
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
A feature of modern life that is impossible to ignore: the incredible proliferation of ideas, information, images, disciplinary knowledge, and material products that we're all witnessing today. Such proliferation makes the activities of filtering, enabling, synthesizing, framing, and remembering more and more important as basic navigational tools for 21st century life.
A Few Words On The Soul - poem by Wislawa Szymborska
A fierce Zen master and a strict meditation schedule are not required for the production of catastrophes. Life will do it for us quite naturally. Any moment is a catastrophe, a total disaster, a fierce and bracing challenge, if we are awake to it. Any moment calls for forbearance.
A fixed idea is eventually (often?) broken.
A foolproof way of (avoiding) learning new vocabulary
A framework for sound practice through eight commandments of sustainable stewardship of the natural commons ...
A glimpse into the writing approach of Ursula K. Le Guin
A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time and is not consumed by all millennia, although it serves every time for nourishment: thus it is the great paradox of literature, the intransitory amid the changing, the food that always remains esteemed, like salt, and never loses its savor.
A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.
A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while s/he gets to know something.
A good point of view is worth many IQ points.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
A joke about Voltaire
A key to great writing is to never use semi-colons...
A knife is neither true nor false, but anyone impaled on its blade is in error.
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.
A Law of Computer Programming: Make it possible for programmers to write in English and you will find the programmers cannot write in English.
A leader is best When people barely know he exists Of a good leader, who talks little, When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, They will say, “We did this ourselves.”
A liberated mind is permeated by a rather unspectacular yet powerful feeling. I call it the joy of being alive for no other reason than being alive.
A lie can only thrive on truth; lies, heaped one upon another, lack substance.
A Life - poem by Howard Nemerov
A life’s work is not a series of stepping-stones, onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, in conversation with the elements. Looking back, we see the wake we have left as only a brief glimmering trace on the waters.
A lifetime is more than sufficiently long for people to get what there is of it wrong.
A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring ...
A long way of saying that life is complicated (and hard (and uncertain))
A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world. Everyone you meet is your mirror.
A man pours bright purple in the one marked ORANGE orange in the one marked GRAPE, the grape drink in the machine marked ORANGE and orange drink in the GRAPE. Just the one word large and clear, unmistakeable, on each machine.
A man with outward courage dares to die; a man with inner courage dares to live.
A man's errors are his portals of discovery.
A man’s maturity: that is to have rediscovered the seriousness he possessed as a child at play.
A Math-y limerick/poem by John Saxon
A mathematician is a device for converting coffee into theorems.
A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
A mirror has no heart but plenty of ideas.
A one-word alteration: "We must love one another or die"
A pedagogical approach to teaching: show the Big Picture first
A person who knows not, and knows not that they know not, they are a fool; shun them... A person who knows, and knows that they know, they are wise; follow them.
A personal library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there.
A personal library too big to get through in a lifetime isn’t a sign of failure or ignorance, but rather a badge of honor.
A philosopher is someone who would say: we know it's possible in practice; we're trying to figure out if it's possible in principle.
A photograph offers us a glimpse into the abyss of time.
A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.
A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling
A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
A powerful way to teach is to find ideas and representations that allow “beginners to act as intermediates”, that is, for learners to immediately start doing the actual activity in some real form.
A Question for Robert Frost
A question is a powerful thing, a mighty use of words. Questions elicit answers in their likeness. Answers mirror the questions they rise, or fall, to meet.
A random string is paradoxically full of information, more information than any English word. A random string, like information, is surprise. Chance, therefore, is also surprise. Pure chance can’t be reduced. It can’t be compressed. It can’t be anticipated. Chance is, as Jean Arp put it, the "deadly thunderbolt." ... Can a machine operate along non-deterministic lines? Asked another way, can a machine be more than the sum of its parts? Can it be creative? The answer is not so much to be found in randomness, in stochastic algorithms, but in learning.
A saying related to death goes: You can't take it with you. That's true, but you can't take "you" with you either.
A scientific theory is a useful tool, and can be accepted as true knowledge—a great, rich, beautiful insight. Not a revealed truth, but an earned one. In the realm of the spirit, it appears that we can’t earn knowledge. We can only accept it as a gift: the gift of belief. Belief is a great word, and a believed truth too can be great and beautiful. It matters very greatly what one believes in.
A Seagull Moment
A sense of blessedness comes from a change of heart, not from more blessings.
A sense of economy is generally essential to both mathematics and humor, and one way to measure economy is by employing notions of complexity devised by Gregory Chaitin and others. If two computer programs generate the same sequence of 0's and 1's, for example, the shorter one is generally to be preferred. This is a version of Occam’s razor, which advises us not to introduce unnecessary entities or complications into our accounts.
A sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised.
A sepal, petal, and a thorn - poem by Emily Dickinson
A simple question "What is there?" can be answered in a word: "Everything".
A social scientist is someone who thinks that the plural of "anecdote" is "data".
A stranger comes to town, and a hero goes on a quest.
A sturdy way to cope with dying is to think of yourself as a pedagogue, modeling dignity for those around you. Those who can't live, teach.
A totally nondenominational prayer to the bureaucracy gods
A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.
A two-star review, that’s a thing of beauty.
A typo is an error in typing something. A thinko is a programmatic logic error.
A very important fact about mental and social processes is that people are not governed by their ideas or concepts. Even in mathematics, that most cerebral of all subjects, it is people who govern ideas not ideas which control people.
A vivid description of a sunrise (or "sunmove" :)
A well-written program is its own heaven; a poorly-written program is its own hell.
A wicked problem is a social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve for as many as four reasons: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems.
A wise Jewish response to ‘When Bad Things Happen to Good People’.
A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool because he has to say something.
A wise teacher learns to be a good listener. Listening does not imply agreement, nor does it require a response.
A word was not a thing, no. A thing was not a word. But somehow the two—things—became inseparable. Was everything a great fabrication? Words were like an invisible skin, enwrapping the world and giving it reality. Yet you could not say the world would not be there, would not be real if you took away the words.
A Zen Koan about what happens after death
A. A. Milne
About aging: It’s a good time for spiritual inquiry, for retreats, for study. When you can’t run around outside as much as you used to, you can journey inward.
About Compassion
About life: you are doing it anyway. You might as well be attentive.
About questioning things, doubt, curiosity, and action
About time: (I try to be) free-handed but careful. I cannot boast that I waste nothing, but I can at least tell you what I am wasting, and the cause and manner of the loss; I can give you the reasons why I am a poor man…
Above all, historians should make us understand the ways in which the past was distinct. This shouldn’t prevent us from making moral judgments about it. But we can make better judgments, informed by the knowledge that our forebears rarely acted with the benefit (or burden) of our assumptions, expectations, experiences and values. There’s a lesson in humility in that, as well as a reminder that we are only actors in time whose most cherished ideas may eventually seem strange, and sometimes abhorrent, to our descendants.
abracadabra - It came to pass as it was spoken
Abraham Flexner
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Absence of Mind - by Marilynne Robinson
Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders. Respect your elders.
Accept! For there is nothing else.
acceptance
Acceptance and hope are connected. Acceptance is not resignation. Acceptance is a lively engagement with conditions as they are.
Acquiring knowledge for its own sake. Gaining wisdom for the love of knowledge (for its own sake).
Actions do not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
Active critics are a great asset. Without the slightest expenditure of time or effort, we have our weakness and error made apparent and alternatives proposed. We need only listen carefully, dismiss that which arises from ignorance, ignore that which arises from envy or malice, and embrace that which has merit.
Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one.
Adam Frank
Adam Gopnik
Adam Phillips
Adam Smith
Addictions ... started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn't seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were ... less intelligent than goldfish.
Adrian Bejan
Advantages of an aBook
Adventure is something you seek for pleasure, or even for profit, like a gold rush or invading a country;...but experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth (and reflection on it) that finally overtakes (and transforms) you.
Advice for parents/caretakers: It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them.
Advice to professionals (journalists and programmers)
Afraid So - poem by Jeanne Marie Beaumont
After you set a goal for yourself, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary.
Age - poem by Kay Ryan
aging
Aging is about mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.
Aging is not unlike cancer, which some scientists believe initially evolved as a survival mechanism, allowing cells (in certain environmental circumstances) to abandon higher functionality in order to proliferate unchecked.
Ah, the freshness in the face of leaving a task undone!
Ah, to get better, one must let go of trying to get better. To get from point A to point B, you need to just really BE at point B. And so on.
Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied? Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.
Ajahn Chah
Alain
Alain de Botton
Alan Alda
Alan Bennett
Alan Blackwell
Alan Kay
Alan Lew
Alan Lightman
Alan Perlis
Alan Turing
Alan Turing wondered what it would take for machines to become intelligent. John von Neumann wondered what it would take for machines to self-reproduce. Claude Shannon wondered what it would take for machines to communicate reliably, no matter how much noise intervened. Norbert Wiener wondered how long it would take for machines to assume control.
Alan Watts
Albert Camus
Albert Einstein
Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, produces all the effects of intoxication.
Aldous Huxley
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Alex Falcone
Alex Ross
Alexander Pope
Alfred E. Neuman
Alfred Korzybski
Alfred Mark
Alfred North Whitehead
Algorithms are not authorities, and we should be skeptical of how they work. And even when they might work, the issues of governance around them are formidable. But we should not run away from the potential of algorithms to truly help us, and we should be trying to frame the problem away from the binary of "algorithms good, humans bad" or "humans good, algorithms bad" and towards a deeper investigation of how human and machine can work together.
Ali Minai
All anybody can do in bad times is Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive the bad times.
All experience is preceded by mind, Led by mind, Made by mind. Speak or act with a peaceful mind, And happiness follows Like a never-departing shadow.
All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so.
All good work should have an edge of life and death to it, if not immediately apparent, then to be found by ardently exploring its greater context. Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.
All I Want - poem by Julia Wiener
All I want to know is where I'm going to die so I'll never go there.
All laws are local... no matter how much we know about something, it is just the tip of the iceberg. And most disasters occur by coming in contact with the other part of the iceberg... A law does not know how local it is.
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated.
All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so, is something worse.
All of us are fortunate to have been born. [However] it cannot be said that not to be born is a misfortune.
All of us, to some extent, borrow from others, from the culture around us. Ideas are in the air, and we may appropriate, often without realizing, the phrases and language of the times... What is at issue is... what one does with what is borrowed or imitated or derived; how deeply one assimilates it, takes it into oneself, compounds it with one’s own experiences and thoughts and feelings, places it in relation to oneself, and expresses it in a new way, one’s own.
All philosophy is based on two things only: curiosity and poor eyesight ... the trouble is, we want to know more than we can see.
All that we are is a result of what we have thought.
All that you touch, You Change. All that you Change, Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change.
All the somethings in and around us with which we preoccupy ourselves from morning to night are potentially nothing to us. If we died, they would dissolve in our tightest grasp, forgotten if they were in our mind, lost if they were in our hand, faded into blank numbness if they were our mind and body.
All those who believe in psychokinesis raise my hand.
All we have to go on is experiential evidence. And sooner or later we have to trust our own experience, because that’s all we really have.
All you need is ignorance and confidence and success is assured.
All's Well That Ends As You Like It.
Almost all of us often engage in a kind of tacit chronological exceptionalism. Unlike all those suckers who fell for the flat earth or the geocentric universe or cold fusion or the cosmological constant, we ourselves have the great good luck to be alive during the very apex of accurate human thought.
Almost everybody thinking about spiritual growth has one deep, underlying concern, and that is everything they are going to have to give up. It almost never occurs to anybody that all they're going to give up is suffering.
Alone, I am what I am, but in community I have the chance to become everything that I can be.
Alphabetical ordering of content
Also men fall into two classes – those who forget views and those who remember them, even in small rooms.
Alternative Mathematics?
Although it wouldn’t be unfair to present anything she said as a stand-alone thought, it would be untrue to the remarkable way her mind skips the stones of a question across its ample surface.
Although people tend to place a higher value on the things they know than on the things they don’t know, it is the things we don’t know, and therefore can’t see coming, that tend to shape our world most dramatically.
Alvin Toffler
Always do good, since even if you initially do it not for its own sake, you'll eventually come to do it for its own sake.
Always do right - this will gratify some and astonish the rest.
Always give the benefit of the doubt; don't forget red flags.
Always give without remembering and always receive without forgetting.
Am I to concern myself with an allotment of days I never had and was never promised? Must I check off each day of my life as if I am subtracting from this imaginary hoard? No, on the contrary, I will add each day of my life to my treasure of days lived. And with each day, my treasure will grow, not diminish.
Amanda Ripley
Ambition kills our sense of the miraculous; ambition, ironically, could hide the stars. Ambition also lacked surprise, it lacked a sense of belonging to the territory through which we travel, and it lacked a sense of the greater story of which we are a part. It lacked completely the understanding that no matter the self-conceited importance of our work, at the end of our lives we are compost for worlds we cannot yet imagine. Ambition takes us toward a horizon but not over it— that line would always recede before our reaching hands.
Ambrose Bierce
Ambrose Bierce Quotes
Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own mind, the world of books is the greatest.
Amor Towles
Amos Tversky
Amplification allows the difference that makes a difference to make a difference.
Amy Dickinson
An atheist to a believer: One of us is a fool. If you are right, you will be able to tell me about it, but if I am right, no one will know.
An education is the remaking of a person. You can submit to that remaking passively, or you can take an active part. To choose the second is to remake yourself. To choose the first is to be made by others.
An elder is someone who has come to a point of being able to understand his place in the world and the life he has lived in it.
An engineer's (helpful?) perspective
An excellent app/program works flawlessly (as opposed to flaws worklessly).
An expert problem solver must be enodowed with two incompatible qualities – a restless imagination and a patient pertinacity.
An explanatory principle that can’t distinguish cases explains nothing.
An investment in interest always pays off with the best knowledge.
An Oar Moment
An object is not so attached to its name that we cannot find another one that would suit it better.
An old man said to his grandson, “Boy, I have two tigers caged within me. One is love and compassion. The other is fear and anger”. The young boy asked, “Which one will win, grandfather?” The old man replied, “The one I feed”.
An optimist and a pessimist were arguing about philosophy. The optimist declares: "This is the best of all possible worlds." The pessimist sighs and says, "You're right."
An Unbeliever's Prayer - John Gunther, Jr.
Anais Nin
Analogies prove nothing, that is quite true, but they can make one feel more at home.
Analysis Of Baseball - poem by May Swenson
Anat Gov
Ancients had a different way of relating to the world, that they experienced it as something that interacted with them. When they observed the world, the world observed them back.
And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and glorious life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they still had a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.
And sure enough, even waiting will end...if you can just wait long enough.
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
And tomorrow, what shall tomorrow bring to the overprudent dog burying bones in the trackless sand as he follows the pilgrims to the holy city?
And when things start to happen, don't worry. Don't stew. Just go right along. You'll start happening too.
And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay.
Anders Ericsson
Andre Gide
Andrea diSessa
Andrew Solomon
Andy Clark
Ann Hamilton
Anna Quindlen
Anne Lamott
Annie Dillard
Annie Murphy Paul
anonymous
Anthony Doerr
Anticipation of Love - poem by Jorge Luis Borges
Antimatter - poem by Russell Edson
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Anton Chekhov
Antonio Porchia
Anxiety is not optional in life. It’s part of life. We come into life through anxiety. We have to acknowledge our anxiety, but we must not fear.
Any hour whose demands we do not fulfill, or fulfill halfheartedly, this hour is forfeited, forfeited “for all eternity.” Conversely, what we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality, into a reality in which it is only apparently “canceled out” by becoming the past. In truth, it has actually been preserved, in the sense of being kept safe. Having been is in this sense perhaps even the safest form of being. The “being,” the reality that we have rescued into the past in this way, can no longer be harmed by transitoriness.
Any live man is better than any dead man but no live or dead man is very much better than any other live or dead man.
Any one phenomenon will not be the effect of a single cause, but the resultant of causes infinitely numerous.
Any phenomenon in nature more complex than the human brain is by definition too complex for us to comprehend. Alternatively, we cannot make predictions (generate binary sequences) of greater complexity than (the information encoded within) our brains. Regularities may exist that provide a key to understanding the universe, but they may be beyond what I term the human brain's "complexity horizon”.
Any subject can be taught in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced.
Anyone who attempts to force the moment, the moment imposes on him in response, and conversely, anyone who is patient and yields to the moment, the moment accommodates him in response.
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.
Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.
Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us...
Anyway - Poem by Mother Teresa
Apply what you read: Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.
Applying computer technology is simply finding the right wrench to pound in the correct screw.
Appreciation for what we are, for mystery, for gratuity, for contingency, for the patchwork nature of our experience, for limitation—for life—this is the real gift of The Real Work (learning/education). We may only be ready to appreciate this in the later phases of our learning days, which is another good argument for keeping at it, for being a student to the end. We need to go on reckoning with our passage.
Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. "Immortality" may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.
Arete is the art of expressing personal excellence; personal excellence and effectiveness to the highest degree that one is capable of.
Ariel Foxman
Aristotle
Aristotle - poem by Billy Collins
Arnold Bennett
Arrogance in CS is measured in nano Dijkstras.
art
Art and science do not establish themselves despite failure but through it; (...) failure, always ineluctable, is in certain cases spared and in others not.
Art is the lie that shows us the truth.
Art Spiegelman
Arthur C. Brooks
Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Eddington
Arthur Schopenhauer
Artificial language making
artist
As a logical possibility, of course, it's always possible that there are incomprehensible things in the universe. But I have argued that taking that seriously is exactly the same as a belief in the supernatural ...
As a software creator you work inside an orderly, simplified hallucination
As a teacher, I am paid about half as much as my previous high-tech salary, but I have about twice as much time to do things I love doing.
As an artist, My job is to keep the meaning completely embodied in the work itself, and therefore alive and capable of change. I think that’s how an artist can best speak as a member of a moral community: clearly, yet leaving around her words that area of silence, that empty space, in which other and further truths and perceptions can form in other minds.
As human beings, don’t we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers?
As measured by the millions of those who speak it fluently . . . , mathematics is arguably the most successful global language ever spoken. . . . Equations are like poetry: They speak truths with a unique precision, convey volumes of information in rather brief terms. . . . And just as conventional poetry helps us to see deep within ourselves, mathematical poetry helps us to see far beyond ourselves.
As melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness, so humor is comedy that has lost its bodily weight.
As someone who has personally struggled with “twice knowing,” I think maybe we’d all be better off if we let the designation “sapiens sapiens” just mean that we have to learn something at least twice before we know it.
As teachers, we cannot claim to have taught problem solving just because we have given students many problems to solve.
As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.
As we grow more modern and technologically advanced, we need the virtues our traditions carry forward in time more, not less.
As you grow older, it gets colder. You see through things.
At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, the late Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, the author Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch 22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have: Enough.
At any present moment, before retrospect can make its exclusions, the cultural atmosphere is thick with junk ideation, which is, in that moment, indisputably influential, even dominant, and therefore not to be excluded from any meaningful understanding of what we are and how we proceed over time. It is the collective expression of the individual capacity for error, which is continuous with our gift for hypothesis and no doubt crucial to our ability to learn and to imagine.
At first, we realize that we do not control the world outside us. I don't decide when it rains. Then we realize that we do not control what's happening inside our own body. I don't control my blood pressure. Next, we understand that we don't even govern our brain. I don't tell the neurons when to fire. That's more difficult. Ultimately we should realize that we do not control our desires, or even our reactions to these desires.
At the end of the day, we have to manufacture our own meaning, our own purpose — we have to manufacture coherence… to make sense of existence. And when you manufacture purpose, that doesn’t make it artificial — that makes it so much more noble than accepting purpose that is thrust upon you from the outer world.
Atheist science... seems to be based on a fundamental error. It takes whatever has been observed and described as having been explained. To describe the processes of ontogeny or mortality does not explain why we are born or why we die... Explanation would necessarily involve an account of the intention behind (the making or being of a thing). So perhaps the very idea of explanation is an error of anthropomorphism when it is applied to things that do not involve human intention.
atheists should learn to inform themselves about what religions are up to and then selectively steal the best bits.
Attention is the most precious resource we have — it’s the window through which we experience our lives. And for many of us, that window is fogging... I don’t think time is the right way to measure whatever it is I have left — attention is. I only have so much attention left to give. And it’s how I use that attention that will decide what I make of that time.
Austin Kleon
author
Autopsychography
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
Avoid Seeking Exact Definitions (e.g., Ikigai)
awareness
Barbara Fredrickson
Barbara Johnson
Barbara Johnson Quotes
Baroque, Purple, and Beautiful: In Praise of the Long, Complicated Sentence
Base words are uttered only by the base And can for such at once be understood; But noble platitudes — ah, there's a case Where the most careful scrutiny is needed To tell a voice that's genuinely good From one that's base but merely has succeeded.
Baseball is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed... Most of all it is about time and timelessness, speed and grace, failure and loss, imperishable hope, and coming home.
Basho Matsuo
Be brave. It is okay and even good that you are afraid. Do not strive for fearlessness, for the world is a dangerous place, and to be fearless is to be stupid. Bravery is not the absence of fear, but courage in the face of it.
Be calm, witty, and alert (while navigating through life).
Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.
Be interested. Everyone wants to be interesting – but the vitalizing thing is to be interested. Keep a sense of curiosity. Discover new things. Care. Risk failure. Reach out.
Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction.
Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.
Be not afraid of growing slowly. Be afraid only of standing still.
Be sincere; be brief; be seated.
Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.
Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.
Beauty is that, in the presence of which, we feel more alive.
Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment. . . . Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late.
Because everything is complex and changing at all times, there is no way to prescribe the “right” response in advance. Each moment is unique and fundamentally unpredictable. To “know” means to live the present based on the experiences of the past.
Because of the strong motivation to deceive ourselves about the reality of death, we should confront at least the possibility, if not the high probability, that death is ‘it’.
Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
Because the Internet is so new, we still don't really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that's what we're used to.
Because the signs of time's coming and going are obvious, people do not doubt it. Although they do not doubt it, they do not understand it.
Because this race to success comes to an end no matter what we do, we always, all of us, in a way, finish last. How will we help young people know about that? And if we cheer so hard for them to get to the front, how will they hear their own heartbeats measuring a long perspective?
Because we are not designed to be more orderly than anything else ..., if you can’t ever end things neatly, can’t ever put them back quite the way you found them, surely the alternative is to remain stubbornly carbonated with possibility, to never rest from your rotation. To keep assembling stories ... about how everything was everything, about how much love is essential.
Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry - Poem by Howard Nemerov
Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers; after practicing Zen for a while, one sees that mountains are not really mountains and rivers are not really rivers; after a long effort and practice, one sees that mountains are mountains again and rivers are rivers again.
Before speaking ask yourself: is it true? Is it kind? Is it helpful? Is it the right time?
Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life.
Being forced to write comments actually improves code, because it is easier to fix a crock than to explain it.
Being reliable does not mean being constant, or the same every and all the time. Being reliable means being appropriate, regardless of the shifts and changes in the situation.
Being resilient doesn't mean feeling good all the time - it means you're good with feeling bad sometimes.
Being smart about being wise: The most foolish of all errors is for clever young men to believe that they forfeit their originality in recognizing a truth which has already been recognized by others.
belief
Belief in God without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair is not belief in God at all, but belief in a mere idea of God.
Belief is one of the most powerful organic forces in the multiverse. It may not be able to move mountains, exactly. But it can create someone who can. People get exactly the wrong idea about belief. They think it works back to front. They think the sequence is, first object, then belief. In fact, it works the other way.
Believe none of what you hear, half of what you read, and a little of what you see.
Believe those who are seeking the way; doubt those who find it.
Believers (in the afterlife) cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there is such a place. Neither can I disprove it. I cannot find the bookmaker willing to take my bet on it. How will one who guesses right be able to collect his winnings?
Ben Sparks
Benjamin Disraeli
Benjamin Franklin
Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
Bertold Brecht
Bertrand Russell
Better safe than sorry, from natural selection’s point of view. “False positives” are a feature, not a bug, even though they make you suffer by fostering an illusion.
Better safe than sorry?
Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.
Beverly Sills
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Beware, the time approaches when human beings will no longer launch the arrow of their longing beyond the human, and the string of their bow will have forgotten how to whir.
Bill Gates
Billy Collins
BJ Miller
Black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought to be. Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly to another universe. So if you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up – there’s a way out.
Blaise Pascal
Bob Alberti
Body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body.
Bonnie Friedman
Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.
Book: Duck, Death and the Tulip - by Wolf Erlbruch
Bookish types; They thought you could see life through books but you couldn’t, the reason being that the words got in the way.
Books are a conversation in time and space
Books not only help to reveal who we are; they help us to transcend who we were.
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.
Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom... The felt difference of quality between past and future, therefore, is not an intrinsic difference, but only a difference in relation to us: to impartial contemplation, it ceases to exist.
Both religion and literature are narratives whose purpose is to put human life, causality, and meaning in relation, to make each of them in some degree intelligible in terms of the other two.
Both Sides Now - song lyrics
Both sides now (or ever)
Both these and these are the words of (wisdom), and (/but) the (conduct will be) like the House of Hillel.
Bottom Up Programming
Brene Brown
Bret Stephens
Bret Victor
Brian Christian
Brian Eno
Brian Greene
Brian Harvey
Brian Hayes
Brian Kernighan
Brian Martin
Brian Tracy
Broken models of the world leave a trail of clues where they bash against reality. Most people don't want to see these clues. It would be an understatement to say that they're attached to their current model; it's what they think in; so they'll tend to ignore the trail of clues left by its breakage...
Bruce Lee
Bruce Springsteen
Buckminster Fuller
Buddha
Buddhism
Buddhism is a clever way to enjoy life.
Buddhist teacher
Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.
Bureaucrats cut red tape - - lengthwise.
business
business person
But the speed at which we find explanations for things that happened makes it difficult for us to learn the deep truth. And the deep truth is that the world is much more uncertain than we feel it is. We see a version of the world that is simplified and just a lot simpler and a lot more certain than the world really is.
By not halting and not straining, I crossed the flood. When I halted I sank; when I struggled I was swept away.
By posing the unanswerable questions of meaning, men establish themselves as question-asking beings. Behind all the cognitive questions for which men find answers, there lurk the unanswerable ones that seem entirely idle and have always been denounced as such. It is more than likely that men, if they were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions, would lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.
By stabilizing the inner world through language, logic, mathematics, and science, we simultaneously stabilize the outer world. The result of all this is the recognition that the clarity we assume to be a basic feature of the natural world merely masks a deeper ambiguity. One of the functions of mathematics and science is precisely to deny this ambiguity. This is really the motivation behind the science of certainty.
C. S. Lewis
C. Stanley Ogilvy
C.A.R. Hoare
Calmness of mind does not mean you should stop your activity. Real calmness should be found in activity itself. We say, "It is easy to have calmness in inactivity, it is hard to have calmness in activity, but calmness in activity is true calmness.
Calvin Trillin
Can representing interests as developable, not fixed, open students to the possibility that a range of domains is interesting and thus enhance learning?
Can you copywrite made-up folk songs?
Care more than others think wise.
career
Caring is a fundamental feature of being in the world … Controlling for all other variables, those given a potted plant to look after consistently lived longer than those who were not.
Carl Bard
Carl Dennis
Carl Gustav Jung
Carl Rogers
Carl Safina
Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan - A Pale Blue Dot
Carl Sagan on humane skepticism
Carl Sagan on the Human Enterprise of Knowledge
Carl Sandburg
Carlo Rovelli
Carol Dweck
Casting - poem by Howard Nemerov
category
Cellular Automata and Free Will
Certain people are sometimes prompted to say or ask the sort of thing which often comes without any other apparent reason than the faculty of speech and the not knowing what to do with it.
Certainly it is possible for a human being to believe that there are facts which humans never will possess the requisite concepts to represent or comprehend.
Certainty is a relic, an atavism, a husk we ought to have outgrown. Mystery is openness to possibility, even at the scale now implied by physics and cosmology. The primordial human tropism toward mystery may well have provided the impetus for all that we have learned.
chance
Change is inevitable....except from vending machines.
Changing where you are can change how much you matter.
chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organised.
Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.
character
Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.
Charity means pardoning the seemingly unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things seem hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the seemingly incredible, or it is no virtue at all.
Charity Seraphina Fields
Charity vs. Kindness
Charles Caleb Colton
Charles Caleb Colton Quotes
Charles Darwin
Charles F. Van Loan
Charles Fernyhough
Charles Isbell
Charles Munger
Charles Tart
Charles William Eliot
Charlie Mackesy
Charlotte Joko Beck
Chase Jarvis
Cheri Huber
Cherie Carter Scott
chess
chess grand master
Chess is just a game in the way that the heart is just a muscle.
Chess lessons about life
Chess taught me that the real purpose of planning in life is not so much to get to where you want to be, but to strengthen the willpower that you will need to get to a good place of any kind. Clarifying purpose through plans is about knowing how you want relationships to change. When you begin to feel the relationships moving in the right way because of how you set your intent in motion, purpose grows at compound interest, just like the grains of rice on the chessboard squares.
Chess vs. Programming Bricolage
Chi Po lived in a province full of mountains, grass, weather, and people. It lay deep in China, far from the sea, a little south of where it might have been, and all in all a little west of where it was.
Chogyam Trungpa
Chris Carter
Chris Seeley
Christian Dillo
Christopher Hitchens
Christopher J. Anderson
Christopher Priest
Chuck Lorre
Cindy Ross
Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe.
Civilization, let me tell you what it is. First the soldier, then the merchant, then the priest, then the lawyer. The merchant hires the soldier and priest to conquer the country for him. First the soldier, he is a murderer; then the priest, he is a liar; then the merchant, he is a thief; and they all bring in the lawyer to make their laws and defend their deeds, and there you have your civilization!
Cixin Liu
Clare Harner
Claude Shannon
Claudius
Clear, unscalable, ahead Rise the Mountains of Instead, From whose cold, cascading streams None may drink except in dreams.
Clifford Geertz
Clive Thompson
Close - Our human essence lies not in arrival, but in being almost there: we are creatures who are on the way, our journey a series of impending anticipated arrivals. We live by unconsciously measuring the inverse distances of our proximity: an intimacy calibrated by the vulnerability we feel in giving up our sense of separation...
coach
Code Poems
Coding the Cosmos: Does Reality Emerge From Simple Computations?
Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.
Colleen Wilcox
College is a place where a professor’s lecture notes go straight to the students’ lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.
Colloquially-expressed goals of an elective computer science course/curriculum
Come here till I comb your hair, said Grandma. Look at that mop, it won't lie down. You didn't get that hair from my side of the family. That's that North of Ireland hair you got from your father. That's the kind of hair you see on Presbyterians. If your mother had married a proper decent Limerickman you wouldn't have this standing up, North of Ireland, Presbyterian hair.
comedian
Comedy deals with that portion of our suffering that is exempt from tragedy.
Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.
Coming from wise hope might at some point show us that what we do matters, even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, or even recognizing that it matters, are not things we can know beforehand.
Comments on Grief
communication
Compare ‘now’ with ‘here’. ‘Here’ designates the place where a speaker is: for two different people ‘here’ points to two different places. Consequently ‘here’ is a word the meaning of which depends on where it is spoken. The technical term for this kind of utterance is ‘indexical’. ‘Now’ also points to the instant in which the word is uttered and is also classed as ‘indexical’. But no one would dream of saying that things ‘here’ exist, whereas things that are not ‘here’ do not exist. So then why do we say that things that are 'now' exist and that everything else doesn't?
compassion
Compatibility is an achievement of love. It shouldn’t be the precondition of love
Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you.
Computational facility is a vastly overrated skill, especially nowadays. Just as no one would confuse a good speller with someone who writes well, no one should equate a whiz at arithmetic with someone who understands and can effectively employ mathematical ideas.
Computer Error message in Haiku
Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better.
Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren't flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.
computer science
Computer Science is among the sciences of the artificial. Where natural sciences focus on questions concerning "what there is", sciences of the artificial are concerned with "what there can be".
Computer science is no more about computers (or programming languages) than astronomy is about telescopes.
Computer science is not about computers, any more than astronomy is about telescopes, or biology about microscopes.
computer scientist
Computers are to computing as instruments are to music. Software is the score whose interpretations amplifies our reach and lifts our spirits. Leonardo da Vinci called music the shaping of the invisible, and his phrase is even more apt as a description of software.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
Computers have replaced the typewriter, the delete key has replaced the wastebasket, and various other keys insert, move and rearrange whole chunks of text. But nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read.
Computing can give us an entirely new kind of vision. We don’t often think of computation that way, as a visual aid, because it’s somewhat difficult to describe what it helps us see. Where telescopes and microscopes show us the very far and the very small, the computer shows us the very much, all at once. It makes time available to the mind and eye. Computation, in that sense, is a kind of compacting of imagination: It helps us generate and explore a zillion scenarios and digest them into a representation that’s easy to play around with.
Conceit lies in thinking you want nothing.
Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff - it is a palliative rather than a remedy.
consciousness
Conservatives are trying to say that there are things that are jeopardized, things that are at risk, precisely because of our modern way of assigning a cost to everything or seeing everything in economic terms, the profit and the loss dominating everything rather than those things that really matter to the spiritual and moral health of the community.
Constantine P. Cavafy
Context is as (more?) important as (than?) content? In a world of imitation games, it is the network that gives meaning, not the expression.
Conway's Game of Life is completely deterministic; it needs only simple rules about having two and three neighbors. Thus all the future generations of every pattern must exist whether we simulate them or not. They can't die. Pulling the plug before a computer counts up to a million (generations) doesn't harm the number one million.
Cormac McCarthy
Correct performance tells you much less about the procedure than the errors do.
Correctly interpreted, pi conveys the entire history of the human race.
Corrie Ten Boom
Could Have - poem by Wislawa Szymborska
Could time itself simply be a product of human Ingenuity allowing us to organize our perceptions of the world around us? It could be that that's what time is. But if you think somewhat more fundamentally of time as the language that allows us to discuss change, it allows us to say things were like this then and they're like this now and so there was a development, and time is the dimension along which that development can take place.
Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities... because it is the quality which guarantees all others.
Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything, except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.
Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
Created Timeline
Creating the mindset of positivity
Creative criticism, interleaved with creative conjecture, is how humans learn one another’s behaviors, including language, and extract meaning from one another’s utterances. Those are also the processes by which all new knowledge is created: They are how we innovate, make progress, and create abstract understanding for its own sake.'
Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity... any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking is naïveté.
Culadasa (John Yates)
Cultivate an attitude of inquiry about everything, be alert and aware to learn something from every experience, and keep your eyes open for simple pleasures.
Cultivate what is skillful. One can cultivate what is skillful. If it were not possible, I would not ask you to do it...
Culturally, I am totally Jewish, but “religiously not so much"...I derive comfort from the discomfort of being alienated from the religious rituals.
culture
curator
Curiosity and originality are closely related. Curiosity feeds originality by giving it new things to work on. But the relationship is closer than that. Curiosity is itself a kind of originality; it's roughly to questions what originality is to answers. And since questions at their best are a big component of answers, curiosity at its best is a creative force.
Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction; magnified by attempts to satisfy it.
Customization Notes
Cyrano de Bergerac
Czeslaw Milosz
D.T. Suzuki
Dag Hammarskjold
Daily Practice - poem by Rumi
Dalai Lama
Dale Carnegie
Dan Cable
Dan Harris
Dan Millman
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Gilbert
Daniel Goleman
Daniel Hillis
Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Mendelsohn
Daniels
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dare You? - poem by Edward Rowland Sill
Daring ideas are like chessmen moving forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.
David A. Sinclair
David Anthony Martin
David B. Schlosser
David Biale
David Bloor
David Bohm
David Brooks
David Darling
David Deutsch
David Epstein
David Epstein Quotes
David Foster Wallace
David Gelernter
David Hilbert
David Hochman
David Hume
David Krakauer
David Markson
David McCullough
David Shenk
David Steindl-Rast
David Toomey
David Whyte
David Whyte - questions
dawn
Day and night, gifts keep pelting down on us. If we were aware of this, gratefulness would overwhelm us. But we go through life in a daze. A power failure makes us aware of what a gift electricity is; a sprained ankle lets us appreciate walking as a gift, a sleepless night, sleep. How much we are missing in life by noticing gifts only when we are suddenly deprived of them.
Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
death
Death destroys a man, but the idea of Death saves him.
Death is just infinity closing in.
Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.
Death is not the life-switch in the off position but the gradual dimming of consciousness, of our experience of aliveness, through the deterioration of its physical infrastructure.
Dee Hock
Deepak Chopra
Dennis Duncan
Derek Bok
Describing how a process works is valuable for two reasons. It forces you to make sure you know how it works. Then it forces you to take the reader through the same sequence of ideas and deductions that made the process clear to you.
Destiny: Two people, simply by looking at the future in radically different ways, have completely different futures awaiting them, no matter their immediate course of action. Even the same course of action, coming from a different way of shaping the conversation, will result in a different outcome. We are shaped by our shaping of the world and are shaped again in turn. The way we face the world alters the face we see in the world.
Detachment and commitment: A willingness to divorce oneself from the obvious is surely a prerequisite for the fresh combinatorial act that produces effective surprise. there must be as a necessary, if not a sufficient, condition a detachment from the forms as they exist… But it is a detachment of commitment. For there is about it a caring, a deep need to understand something, to master a technique, to render a meaning. So while the poet, the mathematician, the scientist must each achieve detachment, they do it in the interest of commitment. And at one stroke they, the creative ones, are disengaged from that which exists conventionally and are engaged deeply in what they construct to replace it.
Devil's Advocate
Diane Ackerman
Dick Guindon
Die Welt is a shekerdik, nur Tsures sind emesdik.
Disinterestedness should not to be confused with indifference
Disputes often have nothing to do with what is true and everything to do with what "true" is.
Do Animals Have Fun?
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.
Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
Do not hurry; do not rest.
Do not seek to be through the vain desire to appear; but rather because it is fitting to be so.
Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep - poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
Do they understand ‘Fiddler’ in America? It’s so Japanese.
Doc Childre
doctor
Documentation is like term insurance: It satisfies because almost no one who subscribes to it depends on its benefits.
Doer is deed. Word is thing. Meaning is sensation.
Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also—if this isn't too grand a word—our tragedy.
Does what’s happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness, and all other qualities that allow a person’s nature to fulfill itself?
Dogen
Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you. Pigs look you in the eye and treat you as an equal.
Doing vs. Believing and Determinism vs. Free Will
Don't ask for things, that you might enjoy life. You were given life, so that you might enjoy things.
Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
Don't be afraid, the darkness you're in is no greater than the darkness inside your own body, they are two darknesses separated by a skin, I bet you've never thought of that, you carry a darkness about with you all the time and that doesn't frighten you...my dear chap, you have to learn to live with the darkness outside just as you learned to live with the darkness inside.
Don't believe everything you think.
Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened.
Don't drive faster than your guardian angel can fly.
Don't fall into the 'sunk cost trap' (where cost is not the only thing that sinks).
Don't gamble; take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it.
Don't miss now for then. Always do now for now. Then, when then is now, You will still be doing NOW for NOW.
Don't mistake motion for progress, and don't get caught up in the thick of thin things.
Don't only think you know. You should also know you think.
Don’t preach. Don’t teach. Don’t judge. Take a loved child by the hand and explore something fascinating together.
Don’t tell me that hard work can be more important than talent. Hard work is a talent. The ability to push yourself, to keep working, practicing, studying more than others is itself a talent. If anyone could do it, everyone would. As with any talent, it must be cultivated to blossom.
Don’t think of it as dying; just think of it as leaving early to avoid the rush.
Don't try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatver-you-already-are.
Don't use force in training the children in the subjects, but rather play.
Don’t waste your life, practise (moment-by-moment mindfulness) in daily life!
Don’t worry about dying. Nothing is going to happen.
Don't you wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence? There's one marked 'Brightness,' but it doesn't work.
Donald D. Hoffman
Donald Knuth
Donald MacKay
Doris Lessing
Dorothy L. Sayers
Dorothy Parker
Doubt is good. It's an emotion we can build on. Perhaps if we feed it with curiosity it will blossom into something useful, like suspicion - and action.
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
Doubt is the privilege of those who have lived a long time.
Doubt seems to be a double-edged sword: One blade cuts through orthodoxy allowing for new potential truths, while the other blade seeks to sever the head of reason from the body of society.
Doug Engelbart
Douglas Adams
Douglas Coupland
Douglas Hofstadter
Dr. Seuss
Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.
Dreams are not so different from Deeds as some may think. All the Deeds of men are only Dreams at first, and all their Deeds will one day become only Dreams.
drinking
Dwight Eisenhower
E. L. Doctorow
E. M. Forster
E.B. White
E.V. drivers kick gas.
Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.
Earthly nature might be parsimonious, but the human mind is prodigal (prolific), itself an anomaly that in its wealth of error as well as of insight is exceptional, utterly unique as far as we know, properly an object of wonder.
Easy reading is damn hard writing.
Eavan Boland
Ecclesiastes
Ecclesiastes, I’d also like to ask you what new thing under the sun you’re planning to work on now?
economics
economist
Ed Simon
Ed Yong
Edgar Allan Poe
Edmund Burke
Edmund Morris
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
education
Education is what, when, and why to do things. Training is how to do it. In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.
Education that gives priority to measurement rather than values, to efficiency rather than conscience, to information rather than ethics, provides no barrier to barbarity and violence. The Holocaust was perpetrated by a society of the most disciplined, highly educated people on earth.
educator
Edward de Bono
Edward Frenkel
Edward O. Wilson
Edward Rowland Sill
Edward Tufte
Edward Young
Efficiency vs. effectiveness - a classic example :)
Ego is the process of our suffering. It is a how, not a what. When we understand how we do something, we are free to change it.
Ego, Envy, Avarice, and Ambition: Four beasts that inevitably devour their keeper. Harbor them at your peril, for although you expect to ride on their back, you will end up in their belly.
Einstein carried his luggage, Freud carried his luggage, Marx carried his luggage, Martha Graham carried her luggage, Edison carried his luggage. All these geniuses carried their luggage and not once before relatively recently did it occur to anybody to put wheels on luggage and pull it; and it was right there waiting to be invented for centuries.
Einstein's advice to a young theoretical physicist
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
Elizabeth Strout
Ella Frances Sanders
Elpruhzlein Robyn
Embedded Search
Embody the most powerful ideas of the culture in the environment.
Emerson Pugh
Emile Zola
Emily Dickinson
Emily Langer
Emmanuel Levinas
Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse.
Engaging in computing and computational exploring and play encourages and builds virtues which enable us to flourish in every area of our lives.
engineer
Enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity.
Enlightenment is a quality of life rather than a state of mind; it entails not altered states but altered traits.
Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass.
Enlightenment is the easiest way in the world to live.
Enlightenment is the ending in yourself of that hope for something other than life being as it is.
environmental activist
Epictetus
Epicurus
Epicurus's old questions are still unanswered: Is he (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? then whence evil?
Epitaph: I tried to be useful.
Equanimity and responsiveness are orthogonal – becoming more equanimous does not mean that you must become less responsive, and becoming more responsive does not mean that you must become less equanimous.
Eric Hoffer
Erich Fromm
Erik Erikson
Erika Harris
Ernest Dowson
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now."
Erwin Knoll
Erwin Schrödinger
Esther Schor
Eugene Ionesco
Eugene Wigner
Even after my parents' death I still have a relationship with them, and it's a relationship that can change, even though they keep on being dead. How I relate to them now is up to me.
Even if he lives a thousand years twice over, he will enjoy no good, since all goes to one place.
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.
Even the seemingly trivial choices can butterfly enormous ripples of which we may remain wholly unwitting — we’ll never know the exact misfortunes we’ve avoided by going down this street and not that, nor the exact magnitude of our unbidden graces.
every beginning is only a continuation and the book of fate is always open in the middle.
Every boat is copied from another boat... It is clear that a very badly made boat will end up at the bottom after one or two voyages and thus never be copied... One could then say, with complete rigor, that it is the sea herself who fashions the boats, choosing those which function and destroying the others.
Every campsite is left behind in the morning.
Every computer program is a model, hatched in the mind, of a real or mental process...
Every human being lives in a bubble. This bubble contains all their perceptions and cognitions. What exists outside the bubble is not knowable. Radical constructivists 'do not make claims about what exists in itself, that is, without an observer or experiencer.'
Every one of the thousands of albatross chicks had but one chance in their short lives to learn to fly... one still day without a breath of wind in the air, a day, unfortunately, the growing birds had responded to some inner urgency to try at last... Without the help of a breeze, they had not cleared the rocks below and their white bodies had smashed into the jutting lava, littering the whole length of the shoreline... You had to ask yourself what equivalent, seemingly merciless urgencies, informed our own human world.
Every time I encounter an object, a person or an experience, I do not see only it, but also how else it could be. I am always asking Myself: How could it be otherwise? This is the question that has made humans what they are today, for without it we would still be living in the tree-tops.
Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself. But each map was incomplete, and I would only locate the treasure if I read all the books, and so the process of finding my best self was an endless quest. And books themselves seemed to reflect this idea. Which is why the plot of every book ever can be boiled down to ‘someone is looking for something’.
Everybody is ignorant. Only on different subjects.
Everyone believes in something. I believe I'll have another beer
Everyone can be great because anyone can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't even have to make your subject and verb agree to serve...You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.
Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.
Everything Everywhere All at once, with a big heart
Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered.
Everything is relative. And there is nothing other than everything and relativity.
Everything leaks. There are no clear-cut level distinctions in nature... .The idea of levels is a useful fiction, great for hygienic text-book writing and quick answers that defend our local turf but seldom advance scientific understanding.
Everything needed for our well-being is right before us, whereas what luxury requires is gathered by many miseries and anxieties. Let us use this gift of nature and count it among the greatest things.
Everything should be built top-down, except the first time. (in defense of bricolage?)
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Everything will be all right in the end. And if it's not all right then it's not yet the end.
Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for that rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.
Everything's easy after it's done; Every battle's a 'cinch' that's won; Every problem is clear that's solved-- The earth was round when it revolved!
Evolution is the amplification of noise.
Evolution, one step at a time
Example isn't another way to teach, it is the only way to teach.
Examples of the power of math notation
Excerpts from Irvin Yalom's book "Staring at the Sun"
Experience is a poor teacher: it gives its tests before it teaches its lessons.
Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you. That is profoundly correct – our life experience is not one event after the other, but a series of opportunities to grow by making sense of what is meaningful and what isn’t.
Experiences, thoughts, — life can force the concept of God on us.
Experiencing and cultivating positive emotions broadens and builds our health and well-being
Expertise is the process of going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence.
Explainer, Elucidator, Enchanter: A Gradation of Great Writing (and teaching) - A visual taxonomy to illuminate the difference between information, knowledge, and meaning.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Ezra Klein
f you make an effort to do the best you can regularly, the results will be about what they should be. Not necessarily what you'd want them to be but they'll be about what they should be; and only you will know whether you did the best you could.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Face the facts of being who you are, for that is what changes who you are.
Facts are not just to be accumulated. They are raw material for making improved, more sophisticated questions with new unknowns. Science, good science, creates as much ignorance as it does knowledge.
Failure is potential without any more time. And the opposite is true too: Success is potential given just the right amount of time.
Fairy tales are not true. They are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.
faith
Faith is a state of openness or trust... the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on...
Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.
Faith, religion, relevance, freshness
Falling: The Code - poem by Li-Young Lee
Famous Last Words
Famous Last Words - Bob Hope
Famous Last Words - David Thoreau
Famous Last Words - Heinrich Heine
Famous Last Words - John Barrymore
Famous Last Words - O. Henry
Famous Last Words - Voltaire
Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can.
Fashion is the science of appearance, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.
Fate always wins. Most of the gods throw dice but Fate plays chess, and you don't find out until it's too late that he's been using two queens all along.
Father
Fear is courage in the making; Worry is wisdom in the making.
Fear of death
feelings
Fenton Johnson
Fernando Pessoa
Festina lente - Finding the balance
Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
Fewer and fewer people have access to what people used to call a liberal education, whose purpose is to help people ground themselves in the story of a given civilization or family of civilizations.
Figurative expressions are like tinsel on the tree of language: They give it whimsy and luster — except when they’re garishly overdone and just weigh it down.
Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.
First impressions: We recognize the alphabet; we are not sure of the language.
First my fear, then my curtsy, last my speech. My fear is, your displeasure; my curtsy, my duty; and my speech, to beg your pardons.
First the man takes a drink, Then the drink takes a drink, Then the drink takes the man!
First Thoughts are the everyday thoughts. Everyone has those. Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think. People who enjoy thinking have those. Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves. They’re rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
Flying a Kite - poem by Rebecca Elson
Focusing on your strengths is required for peak performance, but improving your weaknesses has the potential for the greatest gains.
Follow your blisters.
Following straight lines shortens distances, and also life.
Following the established form is not the main thing in creation, but the innovative is. Any work that does not add a new form and rule to the theory of that profession is not creative work at all.
For a very good reason, we humans were given two ears but only one mouth.
For according to the trollish philosopher Plateau, ‘if you want to understan’ an enemy, you gotta walk a mile in his shoes. Den, if he’s still you enemy, at least you’re a mile away and he’s got no shoes.’
For aging can be the gift that establishes the boundaries of our lives, which previously knew far fewer confines and brooked far fewer restrictions. Everything within those boundaries becomes thus more precious than it was before: love, learning, family, work, health, and even the lessened time itself. We cherish them more, as the urgency increases to use them well.
For aging is an art. The years between its first intimations and the time of the ultimate letting go of all earthly things can—if the readiness and resolve are there—be the real harvest of our lives.
For All Practical Purposes
For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don't like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don't like it.
For any finite set of points, you can always find a mathematical equation going through them... The existence of an equation going through a set of points does not distinguish random points from points that follow a law... a law must be expressed by a simple equation. An equation that is forte composée is meaningless. There is always one loitering about.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
For human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light.
For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.
For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.
For man cometh in vanity, and departeth in darkness, and his name is covered with darkness.
For many this life is a vale of tears; for no one is it free of pain. But we are so designed that we can cope with it if we can live in some context of meaning. Given that powerful help, we can draw on the deep springs of the human spirit, to see our suffering in the framework of all human suffering, to accept the gifts of life with thanks and endure life's indignities with dignity.
For notice: the clouds float by in the sky, and you effortlessly witness that. Feelings float by in the body, and you effortlessly witness that. Thoughts float by in the mind, and you effortlessly witness them. Time floats by in your awareness, and you effortlessly witness that.
For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow—it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento.
For religion to function properly…it shouldn’t require belief.
For the believer, an invisible God is by no means a nonexistent one.
For The Road To Santiago - poem by David Whyte
For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.
For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves
For though consciences are as unlike as foreheads, every intelligence, not including the Scriptural devils who "believe and tremble" has one.
For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years lie behind us are in death’s hands.
Forever is composed of 'nows'.
Forever’s a very long time, especially the bit towards the end.
Forget - poem by Czeslaw Milosz
Forgetfulness - poem by Billy Collins
Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.
Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.
Forgiving is forgetting, in spite of remembering.
Formalism First = Rigor Mortis. Intuition First = Rigor's Mortise.
Forming is good. Form is bad; form is the end; it is death. Forming is movement; it is action. Forming is life.
Four-dimansional vision vs. Flatlandish color perception
Foxes see complexity in what others mistake for simple cause and effect. They understand that most cause-and-effect relationships are probabilistic, not deterministic. There are unknowns and luck, and even when history apparently repeats, it does not do so precisely. They recognize that they are operating in the very definition of a wicked learning environment, where it can be very hard to learn, from either wins or losses.
Frances R. Havergal
Frances Willard
Francis Bacon
Francis Picabia
Francis Sanzaro
Francis Su
Francisco Varela
Francois La Rochefoucauld
Francois Rabelais
Frank Bruni
Frank McCourt
Frank Ramsey
Frank Wilczek
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franz Kafka
Fred Ackroyd
Fred Brooks
Fred Rogers
Frederick Salomon Perls
Free human dialogue, wandering wherever the agility of the mind allows, lies at the heart of education. If teachers do not have the time, the incentive, or the wit to produce that; if students are too demoralized, bored, or distracted to muster the attention their teachers need of them, then that is the educational problem which has to be solved—and solved from inside the experience of the teachers and the students. That problem is metaphysical in nature, not technical.
Free Press, Journalism, and Things that are back to front (and upside down), and are therefore often easier to comprehend, in life and in politics.
Free will cannot be easily dismissed, because we experience it directly. We make choices. No philosopher has yet sat down in a restaurant and told the waiter, “Just bring me whatever the universe has preordained.” Then again, Einstein said that he could “will” himself to light his pipe without feeling particularly free. He liked to quote Schopenhauer… Man can do what he will, but he cannot will what he wills.
freedom
Freedom is creating and having useful tools that don't use you.
Freedom means you're free to do just whatever pleases you; — if, of course that is to say, what you please is what you may.
Freeman Dyson
Friedrich Nietzsche
friendship
Fritjof Capra
From my experience: if you are not a capitalist/egoist when you are younger, then you don't have a brain; if you are not a socialist when you are older, then you don't have a heart.
From the top of the hill there is no hill.
From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted...
Frugal vs. Independent
Full lotus position
Functions are your friends!
Fundamental attribution error: When we look at others we see personality traits that explain their behaviour, but when we look at ourselves we see circumstances that explain our behaviour.
future
G. H. Hardy
G. K. Chesterton
Gabriel García Márquez
Galileo Galilei
Galway Kinnell
Garry Kasparov
Gaston Bachelard
generosity
Generous listening is powered by curiosity, a virtue we can invite and nurture in ourselves to render it instinctive. It involves a kind of vulnerability— a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity. The listener wants to understand the humanity behind the words of the other, and patiently summons one’s own best self and one’s own best words and questions.
Genius - poem by Billy Collins
Genius hesitates. When we approach a truly enormous idea, of the sort that tilts the world on its axis, we’re not excited and arrogant and confident. We’re unsure; we hesitate. The people who are doing really groundbreaking work are tentative, cautious, almost unsettled by the implications of what they’re saying.
Geologic history shows us that life is only a short episode between two eternities of death, and that, even in this episode, conscious thought has lasted and will last only a moment. Thought is only a gleam in the midst of a long night. But it is this gleam which is everything.
Geometry without algebra is dumb! Algebra without geometry is blind!
George Bernard Shaw
George Burns
George Dyson
George Eliot
George Elmer Forsythe
George P. Shultz
George Packer
George Polya
George Saunders
George Soros
George Zebrowski
Georges Duhamel
Gerald Edelman
Gerald Sussman
Gerald Weinberg
Gershom Scholem
Gertrude Stein
Getting older is the best option out of all possible alternatives.
Gil Fronsdal
Given a glass with water up to the mid level, people from the West will either say it's half full or they'll say it's half empty. People from the East will say it's both half full and half empty. They are all right.
Given a glass with water up to the mid level, people will usually either say it's half full or they'll say it's half empty. An engineer will say it's twice as big as it was specified in the requirements.
Giving may be an essence of existence, and a test of our character; it asks deep questions about our relationship to others, to ourselves and, strangely, to time itself: all gifts change with the maturation of their recipients (and giver).
Glenn Clark
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.
God arrives in the transitions—the times between before and after the shatterings, bendings, breakings; moments of devilment and blasted pose...
God doesn't play dice.
God Gets Guilty
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference.
God of the Gaps
God said: it is inaccurate to speak of my role in the scheme of things. I am the scheme of things.
God's zoo is very big (and diverse).
Going in the right direction
Good mathematicians see analogies between theorems or theories. The very best ones see analogies between analogies.
Good quotes [and good writers] give you not only the new thoughts you need but the proper phrasing for the thoughts you already have.
Good work done in the same way for too long, or done in the wrong way for any amount of time, eats away our sense of being right with the world.
Goodness is a large, often a prospective word; like harvest, which at one stage when we talk of it lies all underground, with an indeterminate future...
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Grady Booch
Graham Swift
Grandparents are both our past and our future. In some ways they are what has gone before, and in others they are what we will become.
Gratefulness is the inner gesture of giving meaning to our life by receiving life as a gift.
Gratefulness: To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.
gratitude
Gratitude - poem by W. H. Auden
Gratitude is like a flashlight. It lights up what is already there. You don't necessarily have anything more or different, but suddenly you can actually see what is. And because you can see, you no longer take it for granted.
Green Behind the Ears - poem by Kay Ryan
Gregory Bateson
Gregory Benford
Gregory Chaitin
Greta Nagel
Gretchen Rubin
Groucho Marx
Groundless hope, like unconditional love, is the only kind worth having.
Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
Growth purely for its own sake is the philosophy of cancer.
Günter Ziegler
Guy Steele
H.G. Wells
Hagar The Horrible
Hagar The Horrible on the most important thing in life
Haggai Mark
HaggaiMark
Haikus by Ken Perlin
Haim Shapira
Halford John Mackinder
Halldór Laxness
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Tinti
Hans-Ulrich Obrist
happiness
Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
Happiness is a choice – not a condition.
Happiness is an inside job.
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.
Happiness is not a result to be attained through action, but a fact to be realized through knowledge. The sphere of action is to express it, not to gain it.
Happiness is not the shallow state of feeling pleased and chipper all the time. Happiness is the state of a human being that has achieved cross-level coherence within themselves, and between themselves and people, challenges, work, and institutions around them. Happiness comes from between.
Happy the man, who, studying nature's laws, Thro' known effects can trace the secret cause.
Harold Abelson
Hatred - poem by Wislawa Szymborska
Hatred, even of meanness Contorts the features. Anger, even against injustice Makes the voice hoarse.
Have a lot of 'assiduity': sit down on your ass until you do it.
Having to read footnotes resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.
Hayim Nahman Bialik
He described the odd rather than the fantastic, the disturbing rather than the horrific, the remarkable rather than the outrageous. He dealt with menace, not terror.
He has the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thoughts.
He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.
He is a modest man with much to be modest about.
He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative.
He is happy whom circumstances suit his temper; but he is more excellent who suits his temper to any circumstance.
He left the darkness of the subject unobscured.
He that lets the small things bind him leaves the great undone behind him.
He that loveth a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, and an effectual comforter.
He that would live in peace and at ease, must not speak all he knows nor judge all he sees.
He was so narrow minded he could see through a keyhole with both eyes.
He who dies but does not perish has life everlasting.
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that... seek out conflicting views from persons who actually believe them.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
He who would learn to fly one day must learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.
health
Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.
Healthy Intake of information and News
Heart To Heart - poem by Rita Dove
Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path. It is an introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something or someone that has been with us all along, asking us to be ready to let go of the way we are holding things, and preparation perhaps for the last letting go of all.
Heather Christle
Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect...and perfection doesn't have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.
Heavenly compassion
Heinrich Heine
Helen Ellis
Helen Keller
Hélène Martin
Help isn't something to not want, but something we must learn to do well. To ask for (and give) help and to learn how to ask for (and give) the right kind of help, is a primary, not secondary part, of our growth.
Henri Poincare
Henry David Thoreau
Henry Fielding
Henry Ford
Henry James
Henry Kissinger
Henry Miller
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Ward Beecher
Heraclitus
Herbert Simon
Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't.
Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society: Post-Darwinian evolution
Herman Melville
Hermann Hesse
Hestenes and Sobczyk
Hetan Shah
Hidden Things - poem by Constantine P. Cavafy
Hillel the Elder
Hippocrates
Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.
His prose, passing easily from the abstract to the concrete and from the general to the particular, wound philosophy and poetry together in a seamless web, which was also a web of seeming.
historian
Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.
history
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
History is useful to man in three ways: "monumental", "antiquarian", and "critical" history.
History's contribution
hmark
Hold everything in your hands lightly, otherwise it hurts when God pries your fingers open.
Hold tenderly that which you cherish, for it is precious and a tight grip may crush it. Do not let fear of dropping it cause you to hold it too tightly: the chances are, it's holding you, too.
Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.
Holman Jenkins
Holy Sonnets: Death, be not proud By John Donne
hope
Hope is a revolutionary patience.
Hope is a state of mind, not of the world.
Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Horse sense is the good judgment horses have that prevents them from betting on people.
Hospice care is not a matter of giving up. It’s a decision to shift our efforts from shoring up a body on the verge of the end to providing solace to a soul that’s on the cusp of forever.
How can frontiers be pushed, if one day it will take a lifetime just to reach them in every specialized domain? If this Big Bang of public knowledge keeps apace, subspecialties would be like galaxies, flying away from one another until each is invisible to every other.
How can something be both spherical and cubical? Analogy to the dual nature of light?
How can what a person believes be heresy? It is a contradiction in terms.
How can you awaken, if you are not asleep?
How can you tell an extrovert mathematician? When he is talking to you, he is looking at your shoes instead of his own.
how do you make a universe out of nothing
How Everything Happens - Poem by May Swenson
How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding?
How is consciousness to be defined in a world of machines that reduce human experience to mathematical data, interpreted by their own memories (and processed by self-improving algorithms)?
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.
How Should an Atheist Think About Death?
How to banish melancholia: maintain short views of life, not further than dinner or tea.
How to read fewer books: we want to read in order to learn to be content.
How to recognize your passion - a one-question, self-graded exam
How to take digital notes: Why keep a knowledge and learning organizing system, and criteria for what to keep.
How to tell a joke
How to Write Better News
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?
How you choose to respond each moment to the movie of life determines how you see the next frame, and the next, and eventually how you feel when the movie ends.
Howard Nemerov
Howard Schultz
Howard Thurman
Howard W. Eves
However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
human nature
Human-type creativity is different from the creativity of the biosphere, in that human creativity can form models of the world that say not only what will happen, but why. So an explanation, for example, is something that captures an aspect of the world that is unseen. So, explanations explain the seen in terms of the unseen, whereas biological knowledge, it's only what works.
Humanists believe that human beings produced the progressive advance of human society and also the ills that plague it. They believe that if the ills are to be alleviated, it is humanity that will have to do the job. They disbelieve in the influence of the supernatural on either the good or the bad of society, on either its ills or the alleviation of those ills.
Humans are engineered to seek for laws, whether or not they're actually there.
Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science — by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans — teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.
Humility is the only lens through which great things can be seen (and learned)―and once we have seen them, humility is the only posture possible.
humor
humor is the affectionate communication of insight.
I agree with the realistic Irishman who said he preferred to prophesy after the event.
I already understood perfectly well, at the age of six, that what I was reading was exactly on the path to grown-up reading... Until we come up with a suitable redefinition of what programming is for, until we embrace the utility of programming as a way for serious grown-up people to go about doing the serious things they want to do, without asking those people to pretend to be interested in becoming mathematicians or engineers, this sort of pipeline simply cannot be built for universal programming literacy.
I always think I'm right, but I don't think I'm always right.
I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me.
I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you. A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.
I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet.
I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.
I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.
I am an optimist. I don't have the evidence to prove that Goodness always prevails (except for the fact that we still exist :), but I so strongly suspect that 'things will turn out well in the end' that I don't want to waste my time looking for counter examples.
I am not in isolation because I have cancer. Because... I have a tumor the size of a grapefruit. No... I am in isolation... because I am being treated for cancer. My treatment imperils my health. Herein lies the paradox.
I am not young enough to know everything.
I am proud to call myself “pi-lingual”, meaning the sum of all my fractional languages is a bit more than 3, which is my lighthearted way of answering the question “How many languages do you speak?”
I am waiting for a sentence to appear, for a small thought to try on a jacket of language.
I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent life is less so. Some say it has yet to appear on planet Earth.
I believe in Spirituality as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.
I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our "creations," are simply the notes of our observations.
I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties; that no matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with. That, I think, is the secret of the Universe.
I believe there is an answer to every question. This principle having been stated, the first question which we have a right to ask will be, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’
I believe we have it backward. We are asking what we can get out of a walk, rather than what a walk can get out of us.
I Built Myself a Time Machine - poem by Kenn Nesbitt
I can imagine the antiquity of rock, but the antiquity of a living flower — that is harder. It means that these toughs of the mountain top, with their angelic inflorescence and the devil in their roots, have had the cunning and the effrontery to cheat, not only a winter, but an Ice Age. The scientists have the humility to acknowledge that they don’t know how it has been done.
I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.
I can't be in more than one place at the same time, but I can be in more than one time in the same place.
I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind.
I didn’t ask for success, I asked for wonder.
I do believe there is a kind of crisis going on (in mathematics)—but only because the entire history of mathematics is just one crisis after another. The foundations are always crumbling, and the barbarians are always at the gate.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
I do not know whether transmigration can be proved or maintained on the scientific level, but I know that it is an inspiring theory and full of poetic suggestions, and I am satisfied with this interpretation and do not seem to have any desire to go beyond it. To me, the idea of transmigration has a personal appeal, and as to its scientific and philosophical implications, I leave it to the study of the reader.
I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.
I do not seek to follow the footsteps of the men of old; I seek what they sought.
I don’t believe one ever knows people in their own surroundings; one only knows them away, divorced from all the little strings and cobwebs of habit.
I don't believe that the world can be better than what you allow it to be.
I don’t demand that a theory correspond to reality because I don’t know what (reality) is. . . . I take the positivist viewpoint that a physical theory is just a mathematical model and that it is meaningless to ask whether it corresponds to reality. All that one can ask is that its predictions should be in agreement with observations. . . . All I’m concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements. . .
I don't know who discovered water, but it wasn't a fish.
I don't let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that's offering the patient comfort. I never want to take away something when I don't have anything better to offer him in a way.
I don't think that Laplace was claiming that God didn't exist. It is just that He doesn't intervene, to break the laws of Science. That must be the position of every scientist. A scientific law, is not a scientific law, if it only holds when some supernatural being, decides to let things run, and not intervene.
I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind. Blind but seeing. Blind people who can see, but do not see.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
I dont think you even have to read it (the Bible). I aint for sure you even got to know there is such a book. I think whatever truth is wrote in these pages is wrote in the human heart too and it was wrote there a long time ago and will still be wrote there a long time hence. Even if this book is burned ever copy of it.
I eventually put together a theory of the mind, which says that our minds are just as real as our dreams.
I felt it an honor to walk with students in their Computing struggles and to counsel them to see themselves differently. I loved watching people light up when they grasped an idea. It's one of the best feelings in the world.
I find it interesting to look at magic tricks because I'm a teacher and it's like literally the opposite of my job. Teaching is like explaining clearly so everything is laid out, and magic is completely mystify it so everything is not laid out.
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
I follow the path of Zen because it makes me more likely to appreciate being alive while I am alive.
I go to seek a Great Perhaps.
I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that's just about the best kind of luck you can have.
I had a terrible education. I attended a school for emotionally disturbed teachers.
I had to live awhile before I understood that a lot of things can only be said joking, and not joking.
I have been given to understand how small this world is and how it torments itself with countless things it need not torment itself with if people could find within themselves a little more courage, a little more hope, a little more responsibility, a little more mutual understanding and love.
I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.
I have free will, but not of my own choice. I have never freely chosen to have free will.
I have known a great many troubles in my life, some of which actually happened.
I have learned from my mistakes, and I am sure I could repeat them exactly.
I have long since learned, as a measure of elementary hygiene, to be on guard when anyone quotes Pascal.
I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.
I have nothing, I owe a great deal, and the rest I leave to the poor.
I have only two words to offer to humanity: grow up.
I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat
I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
I intend to live forever - so far, so good.
I keep telling people ‘programming is understanding’ – the computer is a machine that tests if your ideas are correct. Once you understand a problem the program can usually be written pretty quickly. Understanding a problem can take years.
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.
I know that He exists. Somewhere — in Silence — poem
I learned long ago never to say never, or anyhow hardly ever...
I learned that the absolute best way to find out what you don’t understand is to try to express something in your own words. If I had been operating only in input mode, looking at other translations but not actually trying to output the thoughts they expressed, I would never have come to grips with the many shades of meaning that lurk just below the surface.
I learned to be content inside the struggle—understanding that there would be an end to my sadness, even if there was no way for me to know when that end would come. You can find peace within that. In the waiting.
I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.
I like being near the top of a mountain. One can’t get lost there.
I like cooking with wine. I sometimes even put it in the food
I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
I look to the future because that's where I'm going to spend the rest of my life.
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
I meditate because I'm building myself a bigger and better perspective, and occasionally I need to add a new window.
I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always ... so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.
I never came across one of Laplace's "Thus it plainly appears" without feeling sure that I had hours of hard work before me to fill up the chasm and find out how it plainly appears.
I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.
I never predict, I just look out the window and see what's visible - but not yet seen.
I often feel sorry for people who don't read good books; they are missing a chance to lead an extra life.
I quote others only in order the better to express myself.
I Re-Read, Therefore I Understand
I recently started teaching. Teaching keeps you young. Actually, I was younger before I started teaching... but you know what I mean...
I see life as a shared gift, received from others and passed on to others, and living and dying as one process, in which lies both our suffering and our reward...
I see my job as holding doors open or opening windows, but, who comes in and out the doors? What do you see out the window? How do I know?
I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
I suppose when you get down to it, everything is always once in a lifetime. We might as well act like it.
I take toleration to be a part of religion. I do not know which I would sacrifice; I would keep them both: it is not necessary that I should sacrifice either.
I teach when I'm inspired, and I (try to) see to it that I'm inspired at eight o'clock every morning.
I used to be interested in mountains. They moved at a speed I could deal with. They waited for me to catch up... The ocean is like mountains, just much faster.
I wake up each morning and my first thought is, ‘What part of me is in pain today?’
I want to have lots of books on my shelves because I know they are good, because I know they would amuse me, because I like to look at them, and because one day I might have a caprice to read them.
I want to tell people approaching and perhaps fearing old age that it is a time of discovery. If they say “Of what?” I can only answer “We must find out for ourselves, otherwise it wouldn’t be discovery.”
I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.
I was a single parent for a long time, which I think, for men, makes them feminists.
I was just thinking how strange life is, full of inexplicable mystery; you know, like anything else.
I was surprised to find out that harmonizing required you to sing a completely different tune from what other people were singling. You had your part and they had theirs.
I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don't want to... As for grief, you'll find it comes in waves... The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don't really want them to. But you learn that you'll survive them. And other waves will come. And you'll survive them too... may you have many scars from many loves and many shipwrecks.
I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There's one called brightness, but it doesn't work.
I won't for a minute believe that love is blind -- indeed, it gives clearness without sharpness, and surely that is the best light in which to look at anything.
I would gladly go back and travel the road not taken, if I knew at the end of it, I'd find the same set of grandkids (or children, for that matter).
I would not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.
I would say that a big piece of my experience is a delight in mystery, this notion of the limits of your own knowledge, this idea of an open space... We are so animated by things we can’t pin down and understand.
I'd be a pessimist but it would never work.
I'd like to think that we are sold a map that says if you behave yourself when you grow up and you go to this school and you get these grades and then you go to this college then you can have this career in this life. I've always believed that we sell these maps because they're easy to print but what we really ought to be selling is a compass and that's so you figure out how to attune yourself to what is true North to you.
I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
I’ll never know everything. My life would be a lot worse if there was nothing I knew the answers about, and if there was nothing I didn’t know the answers about.
I'll understand quickly, if you explain slowly.
I'm a religious person. But, I don't use my religion to understand global events. As a rabbi once said to me: I don't try to figure out what's in God's briefcase.
I'm certainly not a doctor. In the first place, I'm not a great fan of blood. I don't mind people having it, I just don't enjoy seeing them wear it.
I'm just capable of entertaining the fantastic idea that, in certain circumstances, Homo sapiens might actually be capable of thinking. It must be worth a go, since we've tried everything else.
I'm less interested in why we're here. I'm wholly devoted to while we're here.
I’m not afraid of being dead. At that point, there’s no consciousness. You’re out of the woods. It’s the lead-up to dying that I’m afraid of. Falling apart, being diminished. Not being all there.
I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.
I'm pilingual - I speak exactly π languages
I’ve been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don’t get soggy at the memory of some childhood knickknack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn’t even true at the time—love of the old school, and so on. But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty.
I've just taken stock of other people's ideas, turned them over, stuck them together this way and that and built myself a conceptual deck chair on which to lounge and watch the world go by without being bothered to distraction by the mind-brain problem.
Ian McEwan
Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination…
If — poem by Rudyard Kipling
If a computer simulation of a random process agrees (to some acceptable degree) with a theoretical result, then I think one's confidence in both approaches is enhanced. Such an agreement doesn't, of course, prove that either result is correct, but surely one would then have to believe that a remarkable coincidence had instead occurred.
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
If applying knowledge can create problems, it is not through choosing ignorance that we can solve them.
If art interprets our dreams, the computer executes them in the guise of programs!
If by "free will" you mean the freedom to do what you desire, then yes, humans have free will. But if by "free will" you mean the freedom to choose what to desire, then no, humans have no free will.
If cynicism is inevitable as one ages, so is the yearning for innocence. To children heaven is being an adult, and to adults heaven is being children again.
If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
If humanity is of nature, then so are our inventions.
If I am not for me, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, then when?
If I die – God forbid – I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, ‘Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?’
If I had known what it would be like to have it all, I might have been willing to settle for less.
If I have properly developed the bonds of love among my family and friends, my own withering will be more than offset by blooming in others.
If I seem to be proffering a version of intelligent design, I want to make it clear that I reject any argument that presents itself as a proof of God’s existence. I think there is a degree of irreverence in the very idea of proof.
If it had been possible to build the tower of Babel without ascending it, the work would have been permitted.
If it is supported by morality, concentration is very fruitful, very beneficial. If it is supported by concentration, wisdom is very fruitful, very beneficial. If it is supported by wisdom, the mind becomes free of all defilements.
If it isn't good, let it die. If it doesn't die, make it good.
If math all of a sudden disappeared, physics would be set back by one week.
If measures of well-being, such as health, prosperity, knowledge, and safety, have increased over time, that would be progress. In fact, they have. At the same time, progress does not mean that everything gets better for everyone everywhere all the time. That would not be progress. That would be a miracle. Progress is not a miracle; it’s the result of solving problems.
If men learn this (reading and writing), it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder.
If mortality is what it is like to live after Eden, misunderstanding is what it is like to live after Babel.
If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motion of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to believe that my beliefs are true... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.
If no thought your mind does visit, make your speech not too explicit.
If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Moving, be like water. Still, be like a mirror. Respond like an echo.
If one could rewind the tape of life and let events play out again, the results would almost certainly differ dramatically.
If scientific knowledge is knowledge about the interface, not about reality, there is no reason to assume scientific knowledge can ever be complete or fully coherent.
If sub specie aeternitatis (from eternity's point of view) there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.
If television is educational because watching it can teach you a lot about society, then a cheeseburger is also educational.
If the brain were so simple that we could understand it, then we would be so simple that we couldn't.
If the multiverse idea is correct, then the historic mission of physics to explain all the properties of our universe in terms of fundamental principles — to explain why the properties of our universe must necessarily be what they are — is futile, a beautiful philosophical dream that simply isn’t true. Our universe is what it is simply because we are here.
If the software doesn't have to work, you can always meet any other requirement.
If the unexamined life is not worth living, it’s equally true that the unlived life is not worth examining.
If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so… The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.
If there be any Truth absolutely unrelated to humanity then for us it is absolutely non-existing. It is not difficult to imagine a mind to which the sequence of things happens not in space but only in time like the sequence of notes in music. For such a mind such conception of reality is akin to the musical reality in which Pythagorean geometry can have no meaning.
If there's no solution, then there's no problem.
If there's something that is copied with variation and it's selected, then you must get design appearing out of nowhere. You can't stop it.
If this isn’t nice, what is?
If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there’s nothing in here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?
If we could do only those things God wills, we would not be truly free, though to discern the will of God and act on it is freedom.
If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.
If we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish.
If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
If we waste time looking for life’s meaning, we may have no time to live - or to play.
If work were so pleasant, the rich would keep it for themselves.
If you are bored, you are not paying attention.
If you are not radically amazed, you are not paying attention.
If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgment now.
If you build a man a fire, you'll keep him warm for a night. If you set a man on fire, you'll keep him warm for the rest of his life.
If you can do it then why do it?
If you can see a thing whole… it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
If you can see, look. If you can look, observe.
If you can sit quietly after difficult news, if in financial downturns you remain perfectly calm, if you can see your neighbors travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy, if you can happily eat whatever is put on your plate and fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill, if you can always find contentment just where you are, you are probably a dog.
If you can't explain something to a six-year-old, you really don't understand it yourself.
If you change the way you see the world, you can change the world you see.
If you could banish the fear of death from men's hearts they wouldn't live a day. Who would want this nightmare if not for fear of the next?
If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?
If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over.
If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.
If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're misinformed.
If you find that you're spending almost all your time on theory, start turning some attention to practical things; it will improve your theories. If you find that you're spending almost all your time on practice, start turning some attention to theoretical things; it will improve your practice.
If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.
If you have to have a policy manual, publish the Ten Commandments.
If you know a view as a view, you can be free of that view, beyond views through views. If you know a thought as a thought, you can be free of that thought, free of thought through thought. Views are language, thoughts are language. To train ourselves in language, to open language up, is a practice that cuts to the heart of Buddhist liberation.
If you live to be one hundred, you've got it made. Very few people die past that age.
If you need to be proven right, learning is a challenge. If you’re eager to be proven wrong, learning is delightful.
If you only believe what you know for sure, you do not understand the purpose of belief.
If you stop telling people it's all sorted out after they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive.
If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?
If you talk to God, it's called prayer; if God has the courtesy to reply, it's called schizophrenia.
If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it is lethal.
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
If you understand others you are smart. If you understand yourself you are wise. If you overcome others you are powerful. If you overcome yourself you have strength. If you know how to be satisfied you are rich. If you can act with vigor, you have a will. If you don't lose your objectives you can be long-lasting. If you die without regret, you are eternal.
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
If you want to feel better more often, feel better more often.
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
If you want to know the past, look at the present. If you want to know your future, look at the present.
If you want to make God laugh, tell him your future plans.
If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness, and fears.
If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
If you're suffering, you're attached.
If you’re too afraid of going astray, you won’t go anywhere.
If your society has no variation in productivity, it's probably not because everyone is Thomas Edison. It's probably because you have no Thomas Edisons.
Ignorance is very important! It is an absolutely essential step in the learning process!
Ikigai
Ikigai - Living A Life With Meaning And Purpose
Imagination has a hard time telling us how we will think about the future when we get there. If we have trouble foreseeing future events, then we have even more trouble foreseeing how we will see them when they happen.
Imagination is the ability to bring to mind things that are not present to our senses. Creativity is a step beyond imagination: it is putting your imagination to work.
Imagine a world with all the music dried up: what impoverishment, what loss! But give your thanks not to the lyre but to your ears for the music. And then ask yourself, what other harmonies are there in the air, that you lack the ears to hear?
Imagine taking a very small glass of water and putting into it a teaspoon of salt. Because of the small size of the container, the teaspoon of salt is going to have a big impact upon the water. However, if you approach a much larger body of water, such as a lake, and put into it that same teaspoonful of salt, it will not have the same intensity of impact, because of the vastness and openness of the vessel receiving it. Even when the salt remains the same, the spaciousness of the vessel receiving it changes everything...
Imagining Magic
imgblank
imgquote
Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.
Immortality - poem by Clare Harner
Impermanence isn’t a problem to be overcome with diligent effort on the path. Impermanence is the path. Practice isn’t the way to cope with or overcome impermanence. It is the way to fully appreciate and live it.
In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less.
In a religious context, it is effectively the second chance that makes the life worth living, the allure of being better, even if the criteria for what it is to be better are always up for grabs. The first chance, the life one is born into, is there for the second chance to be fulfilled.
In a war of ideas it is people who get killed.
In a wise old person, one can see that time is not only a destroyer but also a creator.
In a world as crazy as this one, it ought to be easy to find something that happens solely by chance. It isn't.
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
In Buddhism, we say that when you have suffered enough, you are going to get yourself to that which will make the difference. Everybody gets there when they want to. It's perfect. You can suffer for as long as you wish, and when you no longer want to suffer, you can stop.
In computer programming: The most secure, the fastest, and the most maintainable code (by far :) is the code not written (or not needed).
In computer science the word naïve means: We know the problem is complicated, but let’s see how far we can go with a simplistic solution.
In Computer Science: Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.
In defense of parentheses: What an odd thing parentheses can be. The things you put in may be more important than those you leave out.
In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.
In God We Trust, All Others Need to Bring Data.
In great mathematics there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.
In my life I have found two things of priceless worth – learning and loving. Nothing else – not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake – can possibly have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say ‘I have learned’ and ‘I have loved,’ you will also be able to say ‘I have been happy’.
In no language known to me, whether natural or artificial, does a double affirmative yield a negative.
In normal speech and prose our thoughts and feelings are diluted (by stock phrases and roundabout approximations); in poetry those thoughts and feelings can be, must be, concentrated.
In old age, pulling the cart is hard, especially with small oxen.
In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.
In order to be hopeful we needn’t believe that everything will turn out well, we need only believe that we are on the right path.
In ordinary life, we are not aware of the unity of all things, but divide the world into separate objects and events. This division is useful and necessary to cope with our everyday environment, but it is not a fundamental feature of reality. It is an abstraction devised by our discriminating and categorising intellect. To believe that our abstract concepts of separate 'things' and 'events' are realities of nature is an illusion.
In praise of profanity
In principle, one should generally regard a barrage of interrogatives as bad form. Left to themselves, the words who, what, why, when, and where do not a conversation make.
In programming (and probably in other domains, too), there is this great tradition of learning from our mistakes how to make the same mistake again.
In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
In school, first you receive a lesson and then get a test. In life, first you are tested and then you (maybe) learn a lesson.
In speaking of the move from subjective to objective characterization, I wish to remain noncommittal about the existence of an end point, the completely objective intrinsic nature of the thing, which one might or might not be able to reach. It may be more accurate to think of objectivity as a direction in which the understanding can travel. And in understanding a phenomenon like lightning, or rainbows, or clouds, it is legitimate to go as far away as one can from a strictly human viewpoint.
In taking its practical turn, AI has become too much like the man who tries to get to the moon by climbing a tree: “One can report steady progress, all the way to the top of the tree.”
In taking uncontrolled, unlimited, unceasing growth as the only recipe for economic health, we’ve dismissed the ideas of optimum size and keeping the organism in balance.
In teaching, the teacher’s hospitality to the student results in a world more hospitable to the teacher.
In the beginning was the Tao. The Tao gave birth to Space and Time. Therefore Space and Time are Yin and Yang of programming.
In the design of programming languages, one can let oneself be guided by considering "what the machine can do". Considering, however, that the programming language is the bridge between the user and the machine - that it can, in fact, be regarded as his tool - it seems just as important to take into consideration "what man can think".
In the end, secure happiness comes only with the solid feeling we have when we know that we have become the person we were meant to be in this lifetime – that we have matured and used the life we have been given in the best way we could.
In the final analysis, the question of the meaning of life is not asked in the right way, if asked in the way it is generally asked: it is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life — it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us… our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to — of being responsible toward — life.
In the glory days of the MIT Logo Lab, we used to say, “Logo is Lisp disguised as BASIC.” Now, with its first class procedures, lexical scope, and first class continuations, Snap! is Scheme disguised as Scratch.
In the human heart there is a perpetual generation of passions; so that the ruin of one is almost always the foundation of another.
In the long run, there is no distinction between arming ourselves and arming our enemies. The information age is also the disinformation age.
In the mid-twentieth century, a piece of cutting-edge mathematical gadgetry was "like a computer." In the twenty-first century, it is the human math whiz that is "like a computer."
In the past, place used to structure time. Because the longer it took for information to get to me, the farther away it was, and thus theoretically, the farther away from my own lived experience and what was important to me it might have been. And so once electronic media kind of collapsed that ordering function of distance, we have to become active in deciding what is it important for me to give my attention to right now.
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on.
In Zen Practice, if you think you are getting nowhere, it's because you think you are doing something called "getting somewhere".
Individuals must experience their learning as a mode of freedom and spontaneity, not a complex navigation of yet another structure of authority and achievement.
Inefficient software isn't gross. What's gross is a language that makes programmers do needless work. Wasting programmer time is the true inefficiency, not wasting machine time. This will become ever more clear as computers get faster.
Information curators (and teachers?) are our curiosity sherpas, who lead us to things we didn’t know we were interested in until we, well, until we are.
Information is a difference that makes a difference.
Ingenti Percussus Amore - poem by Ursula K. Le Guin
Inside every large program is a small program struggling to get out.
Insofar as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain. And insofar as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
Instants - poem by Jorge Luis Borges
Instead of resisting any emotion, the best way to dispel it is to enter it fully, embrace it and see through your resistance.
Instinct, intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but the confirmation, where it is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of agreement with other beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical realm, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.
Intellectual courage consists in actively and vitally preserving this instant of nascent knowledge, of making it the unceasing fountain of our intuition, and of designing, with the subjective history of our errors and faults, the model of a better, more illuminated life.
Intelligence and culture in the service of adaptation and survival
Intelligence as an Emergent Behavior
Intelligence is just a tool to be used toward a goal, and goals are not always chosen intelligently.
Interest speaks all sorts of tongues and plays all sorts of characters; even that of disinterestedness.
Introspection gives you access to understanding yourself, self reflection lets you process what you learn, and insights are the answers you come up with and that you can act upon.
Invented languages and linguistic inventions
Inventing the lightbulb
Invention does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.
Inventory - by Dorothy Parker
Invested vs. Committed
Iris Murdoch
Iris Smyles
Irvin Yalom
Is God a Taoist? - Raymond Smullyan
Is it more astonishing that a God created all that exists in six days, or that the natural processes of the creative universe have yielded galaxies, chemistry, life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness, culture without a Creator. In my mind and heart, the overwhelming answer is that the truth as best we know it, that all arose with no Creator agent, all on its wondrous own, is so awesome and stunning that it is God enough for me and I hope much of humankind.
Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?
Is mathematics invented or discovered? My preferred answer is neither. It exists independently of us humans, and we know about it, as we know about anything else, through explanations.
Is not my knowing [the secrets of the universe] at all a gift and not a right?
Is the amount of information inversely proportional to wisdom? As information surges, will noise swamp signals? Will the false and trivial overwhelm the true and meaningful?
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Barrow
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Newton
Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
Issan
It [evolution] was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.
It always delighted and impressed me how stubbornly my little beech held on to its leaves.
It feels good to be lost in the right direction.
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach students to program. What fun is there to making plans, acquiring discipline, organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self critical.
It has been often said, very truly, that spirituality is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that spirituality is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
It is a common illusion that something is wrong because we are sad, rather than that nothing is wrong although we are sad.
It is a fine thing to be honest, but it is also very important to be right.
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all the copybooks, and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case...
It is a trite but true observation, that examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts.
It is better to solve the right problem the wrong way than the wrong problem the right way.
It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.
It is compassion rather than the principle of justice which can guard us against being unjust to our fellow men.
It is customary to consider forgetfulness a disadvantage. I believe it is an advantage. Knowing to forget, means loosening the troubles of the past.
It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
It is easy to think to oneself that one’s emotions used to be more vivid than they are, and one’s mind more keen. If this is true it should be forgotten, and if it is forgotten it will probably not be true.
It is essential to employ, trust, and reward those whose perspective, ability, and judgment are radically different from yours. It is also rare, for it requires uncommon humility, tolerance, and wisdom.
It is experience which shapes a language; and it is language which controls an experience.
It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.
It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak.
It is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.
It is in exchanging the gifts of the earth that you shall find abundance and be satisfied. Yet unless the exchange be in love and kindly justice, it will but lead some to greed and others to hunger.
It is much easier to make good men wise, than to make bad men good.
It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
It is not for you to finish the task, but nor are you free to desist from it.
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.
It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.
It is not worth an intelligent person's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.
It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
It is our biological wiring to exist — and then not; it is our psychological wiring to spend our lives running from this elemental fact on the hamster wheel of busyness and the hedonic treadmill of achievement
It is our duty not to suppress tenderness by suspicion; it is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.
It is possible to live almost without remembering, indeed, to live happily, as the beast demonstrates; however, it is generally completely impossible to live without forgetting. Or, to explain myself more clearly concerning my thesis: There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical sense, through which living comes to harm and finally is destroyed, whether it is a person or a people or a culture.
It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely in order for me to take position (to do this): going backwards.
It is said that over the music of Beethoven is spread the twilight of eternal loss and eternal hope. The same goes for life, except for the eternal part.
It is said that there is a technical term for people who believe that little boys and little girls are born indistinguishable and are molded into their natures by parental socialization. The term is 'childless.'
It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Living.
It is software that gives form and purpose to a programmable machine, much as a sculptor shapes clay.
It is stupid to claim that birds are better than frogs because they see farther, or that frogs are better than birds because they see deeper. The world is both broad and deep. We need birds and frogs working together to explore it.
It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
It is the most persistent and greatest adventure in human history, this search to understand the universe, how it works and where it came from. It is difficult to imagine that a handful of residents of a small planet circling an insignificant star in a small galaxy have as their aim a complete understanding of the entire universe, a small speck of creation truly believing it is capable of comprehending the whole.
It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
It is true that altered states of consciousness are more likely as one gets better at meditation, just as good moves are more likely as one gets better at chess. But these are the cart that follows after the horse of skill.
It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case always the wrong size to fit the template called language...(BUT, ALSO) Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.
It is vital to remember that information – in the sense of raw data – is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.
It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.
It is well, when judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality.
It is worth pausing for a moment to consider how far our conclusions are affected by considerations which our simplifying assumptions have forced us to neglect.
It may be possible to lie with statistics, but it is easier to lie without them.
It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
It seems indeed that the past carries its forces into the future, and that the future is necessary as an outlet for forces issuing form the past. A single sweeping life force, an identical élan vital, would thus suffice to consolidate duration. Thought, as a fragment of life, should not impose its rules upon life.
It seems to me that beliefs about the future are so rarely correct that they usually aren’t worth the extra rigidity they impose, and that the best strategy is simply to be aggressively open-minded. Instead of trying to point yourself in the right direction, admit you have no idea what the right direction is, and try instead to be super sensitive to the winds of change.
It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.
It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.
It was seldom that she came out with anything that was not both as pointed and as pleasantly formed as a hedgehog.
It will pass and then it will return. That's such an extraordinary form of consolation, because you can tell people that their heartbreak or their fear will pass; it will, but it will return because that's part of the human condition.
It would be so interesting if we could conduct our lives with the kind of openness that sometimes comes with proximity to death.
It's a fine night to have an evening.
It's a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don't quit when you're tired, you quit when the gorilla is tired.
It's a useful habit never to believe more than half of what people tell you, and not to concern yourself with the rest. Rather keep your mind free and your path your own.
It's about Big Meaning, not Big Data.
It's about eleven times as easy to start something as it is to stop something. But ideas are good for a limited time--but not forever. The British created a civil-service job in 1803 for a man to stand on the Cliffs of Dover with a spyglass. He was supposed to ring a bell if he saw Napoleon coming. The job was abolished in 1945.
It's Always on Time
It’s as silly for me to write about economics as it would be for most economists to write about the use of enjambment in iambic pentameter. But they don’t live in a library, and I do live in an economy. Their life can be perfectly poetry-free if they like, but my life is controlled by their stuff whether I like it or not.
It’s best to be pessimistic about the actions of the world around you, but optimistic in your own ability to surmount those obstacles — outward pessimist, inward optimist.
It’s clear that you cannot pin yourself down as any one particular “thing” but rather that you resemble a story line, an endless progression, variations on a theme, something that enables you to relate your present “self” to the past and future ones.
It's good not to be lulled into a false sense of security and stability. We like things to be consistent and predictable, so that our sleep won't be disturbed.
It’s harder to be kind than clever. And there is a difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.
It’s impossible to fail if one doesn’t know how the end should look. And it’s impossible to succeed. But it’s possible to enjoy.
It’s more like a corkscrew than a path!
It’s nonsense to say money can’t buy happiness. But people exaggerate the extent to which more money can buy more happiness.
It's not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what's required.
It’s not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer.
It's okay to worry, plot, and plan — but only until it's not useful anymore.
It's too late to be ready.
It's very difficult to predict; especially the future.
It's wrong to think that the past is something that’s just gone. It’s still there. It’s just that you’ve gone past. If you drive through a town, it’s still there in the rear-view mirror. Time is a road, but it doesn’t roll up behind you. Things aren’t over just because they’re past.
Italo Calvino
Ithaka - poem by Constantine P. Cavafy
J. B. S. Haldane
J. C. R. Licklider
Jack Kornfield
Jackson H. Brown
Jacob Needleman
James Baldwin
James Baraz
James Beshara
James C. Scott
James Caballero
James Clear
James Geary
James Gleick
James Joyce
James Lendall Basford
James Marriott
James Mattis
James Parker
James Somers
Jan Hawkins
Jane Hirshfield
Janna Levin
Jaron Lanier
Jason Zweig
Jasper Fforde
Jay Ogilvy
Jeanette Winterson
Jeanne Marie Beaumont
Jeff Bezos
Jeff Howard
Jenny Odell
Jens Mönig
Jerome Bruner
Jessica Wolfe
Jewish Kabbalists describe the body as "the shoe of the soul."
Jewish Wisdom
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Jim Holt
Joan Chittister
Joan Didion
Joan Halifax
Joanne Kyger
Job Firings: If clergymen can be defrocked and lawyers can be disbarred, what else can happen?
Jocelyn Brewer
Joe Armstrong
Johann Hari
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johannes Kepler
John Adams
John Albert Michener
John Allen Paulos
John Andrew Holmes
John Atkinson
John Barrymore
John Brockman
John Cage
John Crowley
John Donne
John Dryden
John Dryden Quotes
John F. Kennedy
John Gierach
John Horgan
John Kaag
John L. Casti
John Menick
John Milton
John O’Donohue
John O’Donohue - questions
John Perry Barlow
John Quincy Adams
John Roberts
John Ruskin
John Saxon
John Seely Brown
John Steinbeck
John Stuart Mill
John Updike
John von Neumann
John W. Gardner
John Wooden
John Wyndham
joke
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Jon Kolko
Jonathan Haidt
Jonathan Rowson
Jonathan Safran Foer
Joni Mitchell
Jonny Thomson
Jordan Peterson
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges Quotes
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Jose Saramago
Joseph Campbell
Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller, when asked why he had never written anything as good since Catch 22, replied: “Who has?”
Joseph Joubert
Joseph LeDoux
Joseph Morris
Joseph Stein
Joshua Fields Millburn
Joshua Rothman
journalist
Joy is happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.
Joy is to fun what the deep sea is to a puddle.
Joy Williams
Judea Pearl
Judea Pearl on Free Will and Artificial Intelligence
Judith Shulevitz
Julia Wiener
Julian Barnes
Jurriaan Kemp
Just as an asymptotic curve comes closer and closer to a line but never actually touches it, so we move ever closer toward death throughout life but never actually reach death in experience (if by death we mean the end of an individual’s consciousness).
Just as an Impressionist painting becomes coherent only at a distance, a lifetime is a journey whose full meaning only becomes comprehensible over time.
Just as digital coding collapses the space of possible messages into a simplified version that represents only the difference that makes a difference, so the control system collapses the state space of a controlled system into a simplified model that reflects only the goals of the controller. Ashby’s Law does not imply that every controller must model every state of the system but only those states that matter for advancing the controller’s goals. Thus, in cybernetics, the goal of the controller becomes the perspective from which the world is viewed.
Just as machine learning preserves past successes—accidental or not—in memory, natural selection registers past success through genetic inheritance, building complex organisms out of millions of lucky mistakes. Thus evolution, contrary to many popular assumptions, is not a purely random process, but one that uses information storage as a bulwark against circumstance, keeping the good accidents and discarding the bad... Perhaps the best way to understand machinic creativity is through its strangeness; like natural selection, artificial creativity is perhaps at its strongest when its workings are least familiar.
Just as the good life is something beyond the pleasant life, the meaningful life is beyond the good life.
Just be normal, that’s already crazy enough.
Just because evolution appears to be directional, from less order and complexity toward greater order and complexity, that does not presuppose either an alpha-designer or an omega-telos.
just to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt Gödel.
Kahlil Gibran
Kai Krause
Kant said our senses were like the nightclub doorkeeper who only let people in who were sensibly dressed, and the criteria for being properly dressed or respectably dressed, whatever, was that things had to be covered up in space and time.
Karen Armstrong
Karl De Schweinitz
Karl Ernst von Baer
Karl Popper
Katherine Anne Porter
Kathryn Schulz
Kay Larson
Kay Ryan
Kazuo Ishiguro
Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.
Keep in mind Not to live as if you had endless years ahead of you. Death overshadows you. While you’re alive and able—be good.
Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you.
Keeping Things Whole - poem by Mark Strand
Keith Schwarz
Ken Burns
Ken Jennings
Ken Keyes Jr.
Ken Perlin
Ken Robinson
Ken Thompson
Ken Tzipor - Bird's Nest - song
Ken Wilber
Kenn Nesbitt
Kenneth Reitz
Kent Beck
Kermit the Frog
Kevin Griffin
Kevin Kelly
Kevin McKeen
Kevin Mims
Kevin Simler
Kim Allen
Kindness - Poem by Naomi Shihab Nye
Kindness in words creates confidence, kindness in thinking creates profoundness, kindness in feeling creates love.
Kindness is the only non-delusional response to the human condition.
Knowing how to free oneself is nothing; it's being free that is hard.
Knowing the past is ‘a wonderful way to enlarge the experience of being alive’.
knowledge
Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.
Knowledge cannot be separated from a certain way of life which becomes its living manifestation. To acquire mystical knowledge means to undergo a transformation; one could even say that the knowledge is the transformation.
Knowledge is one. Its division into subjects is a concession to human weakness.
Knowledge isn't just a matter of belief, and it's not just a matter of human psychology. It is information that has causal power.
Kosmos makros chronos paradoksos
Krista Tippett
Kristin van Ogtrop
Kurt Vonnegut
L. M. Sacasas
language
Language always has this double use: not just for communication, but also for organizing your thoughts.
Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.
Language is the operating system of human culture. From language emerges myth and law, gods and money, art and science, friendships and nations and computer code. A.I.’s new mastery of language means it can now hack and manipulate the operating system of civilization.
Language is, on the one hand, a prison: we’re locked inside it, created by it, defined by it, and can see only as far as we can say. On the other hand, language frees us: it unlocks our imagination, allowing us to reach out to the world, and to fly beyond it. This is what poets try to do. Of course, they always fail. The point is not to succeed but to make the attempt; in this there is already some freedom and some delight...
Languages were not created except so that people would not understand each other.
Lao Tzu
Larry Niven
Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.
Laughter is carbonated wholesomeness.
Lauri Malmi
Law is born from despair of human nature.
Lawrence Krauss
leadership
Lean forward into your life...catch the best bits and the finest wind. Just tip your feathers in flight a wee bit and see how dramatically that small lean can change your life.
Learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. Learn why the world wags and what wags it.
learning
Learning and teaching how to learn: Instead of treating “learning” as an initial step that you have to get through before becoming an expert with something to offer, treat the process of learning as a subject in itself – an experience that is worth reporting on in real time. There are insights and revelations you have in the midst of learning something for the first time that you won’t remember after the fact.
Learning by Trial and Error has the double advantage of developing grit and guaranteeing success, as long as the number of Trials is at least one more than the number of Errors.
Learning how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them. Harder, maybe.
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
Learning involves the nurturing of nature.
Learning should not be about hoarding stockpiles of knowledge like gold coins. It is about becoming a different kind of person with a different way of thinking.
Learning the Trees - poem by Howard Nemerov
Learning, like magic, should make people uncomfortable, because neither are passive acts... The feeling that I get is a kind of delicious discomfort at knowing that there is so much out there that I do not understand and the joy in recognizing that there is enormous mystery, which is not a comfortable thing. This, I think, is the principal gift of education.
Lee Iacocca
Lee Smolin
Leo Anthony Gallagher
Leo Rosten
Leonard Cohen
Leonard Mlodinow
Leonhard Euler
Leslie Jamison
Leslie Lamport
Leslie Valiant
Let All Your Thinks Be Thanks.
Let Evening Come - poem by Jane Kenyon
Let the refining and improving of your own life keep you so busy that you have little time to criticize others.
Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.
Let us take care of the children for they have a long way to go. Let us take care of the elders for they have come a long way. Let us take care of those in between for they are doing the work.
Let's learn how to give. But let's also become proficient in the difficult art of receiving.
Let's not overstate the case - there are things far more important to get right than comments. When you've written truly good code your comments are the icing on the cake, delicately placed to add aesthetics and value, rather than liberally slapped on to cover up all the cracks and blemishes.
Let’s take the wings off and try writing on foot, shall we?
Let’s turn the kindness we show toward the stars to members of the human race on Earth and build up trust and understanding between the different peoples and civilizations that make up humanity. But for the universe outside the solar system, we should be ever vigilant, and be ready to attribute the worst of intentions to any Others that might exist in space. For a fragile civilization like ours, this is without a doubt the most responsible path.
Letting go doesn't have to mean walking away. It means the things that hurt you don't hurt you anymore.
Letting go goes hand in hand with acceptance. One does not occur without the other. Letting go is opening the hand. Acceptance is what the open hand receives.
Letting Go vs. Letting Be
Lev Tolstoy
Lewis Carroll
Lewis Richmond
Lex Fridman
Li-Young Lee
Libertarians appear to have a coherent moral philosophy, which includes a general opposition to forcing any particular moral code upon others.
Life (and death) from a different perspective
Life advice and wisdom from Amy Dickinson
Life and Death
Life does not begin when people are born, if it were so, each day would be a day gained, life begins much later, and how often too late, not to mention those lives that have no sooner begun than they are over, which has led one poet to exclaim, Ah, who will write the history of what might have been.
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.
Life is a big gift, and it includes a lot of stuff I never particularly wanted for my birthday. Some of the things in the package I wish I could exchange for a different size or color.
Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.
Life is a joyful participation in a world of sorrows.
Life is a long road on a short journey.
Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
Life is a trick and you get one chance to learn it.
life is darkness, save when ...
Life is hard. Just to keep on keeping on is sometimes an act of courage.
Life is like stepping onto a boat that is about to sail out to sea and sink.
Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
Life is so hard, how can we be anything but kind?
Life is so uncertain that it is far better and more joyous to play your way through it than to plan or pray your way through it.
Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.
Life is, in fact, a battle. On this point optimists and pessimists agree. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally, unhappy.
Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
Life offers more than one path to combine "good living" with "good fortune".
Life on the Möbius strip: Whatever is inside of us continually flows outward, helping to form or deform the world — depending on what we send out. Whatever is outside us continually flows inward, helping to form or deform us — depending on how we take it in. Bit by bit, we and our world are endlessly re-made in this eternal inner-outer exchange.
Life shows us something that Darwin hit upon when he was looking at Life, the organic version. Complexity arises from simplicity! That is such a revelation; we are used to the idea that anything complex must arise out of something more complex. Human brains design airplanes, not the other way around. Life shows us complex virtual “organisms” arising out of the interaction of a few simple rules — so goodbye "Intelligent Design."
Life While-You-Wait – poem by Wislawa Szymborska
Life, joy, duty - poem by Rabindranath Tagore
life's nature
Life's not a race, but there's no speed limit either.
Light after Darkness - poem by Frances R. Havergal
Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds that darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
Light tomorrow with today.
Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.
Like all great rationalists you believed in things that were twice as incredible as theology.
Like an explosive awaiting a spark, unimaginably numerous environments in the universe are waiting out there, for aeons on end, doing nothing at all or blindly generating evidence and storing it up or pouring it out into space. Almost any of them would, if the right knowledge ever reached it, instantly and irrevocably burst into a radically different type of physical activity: intense knowledge-creation, displaying all the various kinds of complexity, universality and reach that are inherent in the laws of nature, and transforming that environment from what is typical today into what could become typical in the future. If we want to, we could be that spark.
Like punning, programming is a play on words.
Like Snow - Poem by Wendell Berry
like sunlight arriving without a sound
Like writing, programming is a difficult and complex art. Few programmers write in flowing poetry; most write in halting prose.
Liking is probably the best form of ownership, and ownership the worst form of liking.
Lillian Lieber
Lily Tomlin
Limits - poem by Jorge Luis Borges
Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.
Listening is much more invigorating than giving voice to all the thoughts and prejudices that anyway keep me company twenty-four hours a day.
Listening is the better part of speaking.
Listening well is ‘a growth experience’. It allows us to get the best of others. The carousel of souls is endless. People have deeply felt and fascinating lives, and they can enfranchise us to worlds we would never otherwise know. If we truly listen, we expand our own intelligence, emotional range, and sense that the world remains open to discovery. Active listening is a kindness to others but, it is also a gift to ourselves.
Little wonder if, within an infinite quantity of matter that ceaselessly changes and stirs, the few animals, vegetables, and minerals we see should happen to be made; no more wonder than getting a royal pair in a hundred casts of the dice.
Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
Live the dash. Between the date you’re born and the date you die, you’d better make your time worthwhile.
Live to the pull of the golden cord
Live with intention. Walk to the edge. Listen Hard. Practice wellness. Play with abandon. Laugh. Choose with no regret. Appreciate your friends. Continue to learn. Do what you love. Live as if this is all there is.
Living has yet to be generally recognized as one of the arts. Being born and growing up are such common experiences that people seldom consider what they involve... we take as a matter of course the miracle of being alive, and the comings and goings of the men and women about us.
Living is a thing you do now or never — which do you?
Living is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
Living things are too beautiful for there not to be a mathematics that describes them.
LLMs are inferring simplified, ghost-like versions of the deep human models of language incorporating first-hand knowledge of the world...
LLMs are showing us the power of emergence
Loch Kelly
logic
Logic only gives man what he needs. Magic gives him what he wants.
Loneliness and self-absorption - poem by Robert Brault
Look at the world: Beings, afflicted with thick ignorance, and repeated suffering, are unreleased from clinging to, and aversion from and passion for what has come to be.
Look nature through, ’tis revolution all; All change, no death.
Looking back, we seem to detect clairvoyance in certain moments of apprehension, but mine were no more than pass like a chill over the heart of any parent watching his treasure asleep in bed or taking off down the road on a bicycle.
Loren Eiseley
Loren Webster
Lost Generation - poem by Jonathan Reed
Lots of my dying patients say they grow in bounds and leaps, and finish all the unfinished business. But assisting a suicide is cheating them of these lessons, like taking a student out of school before final exams. That's not love, it's projecting your own unfinished business.
Louis Kronenberger
Louise Gluck
love
Love at first sight isn't always 20/20.
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
Love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other.
Love people and use things. The reverse does not make you happy.
Love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death
Love while you've got love to give. Live while you've got life to live.
Luck is my middle name. Mind you, my first name is Bad.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Ludwig Wittgenstein
M M Owen
M.J. Ryan
Madeleine Albright
Mae Jemison
Maggie Smith
MainMenu
Make a positive difference in the life of others through education
Make it right before you make it fast. Make it clear before you make it faster. Keep it right when you make it faster.
Making an art out of your technological life is the way to solve the problem of technology.
Malcolm de Chazal
Malcolm de Chazal Quotes
Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. Man can serve his age or rebel against it, but the target of his cooperation or rebellion comes to him from outside.
Man has only his own two feet to stand on, his own human trinity to see him through: Reason, Courage, and Grace. And the first plus the second equals the third.
Man is the animal that draws lines which he himself then stumbles over.
Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft ... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.
Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love...
Man plans and God laughs.
Man sacrifices his health to make money, then he sacrifices his money to recuperate his health. He is so anxious about the future, that he doesn't enjoy the present. And he lives as if he's never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.
Man was created by water to carry itself uphill.
Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
management
Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that we cannot bear the pain. But we have already borne the pain. What we have not done is feel all we are beyond that pain.
Many people explain things – although ‘explain’ is probably too positive a word, and it often really means failed to explain but at some length.
Many people would accept that we do not really have knowledge of the world; we have knowledge only of our representations of the world. Yet we seem condemned by our constitution to treat these representations as if they were the world, for our everyday experience feels as if it were of a given and immediate world.
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Proust
Marcelo Gleiser
Marcus Aurelius
Margaret Edson
Marginalia - poem by Billy Collins
Maria Gainza
Maria Mitchell
Maria Montessori
Maria Popova
Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson on Emily Dickinson
Mario Livio
Mark Guzdial
Mark Kac
Mark Manson
Mark Rothko
Mark Strand
Mark Twain
Mark Van Doren
Marshall McLuhan
Martin Buber
Martin Gardner
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Seligman
Marvin Minsky
Mary Anne Radmacher
Mary Elizabeth Frye
Mary Oliver
Mary Schmich
Mary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft
Maryanne Wolf
Maryanne Wolf Quotes
Mason Cooley
Math is a narrative of human endeavor that shares much with art, music and religion.
Mathematical concepts, such as the number system, can be understood as chosen for their usefulness rather than their inherent correspondence with the nature of the universe. Mathematics can be considered a system of logic, but given that there are many possible logical systems, the choice of a particular system can be linked to its usefulness for human purposes.
Mathematical modeling is about rules - the rules of reality. What distinguishes a mathematical model from, say, a poem, a song, a portrait or any other kind of 'model', is that the mathematical model is an image or picture of reality painted with logical symbols instead of with words, sounds or watercolors.
Mathematical proof is foolproof, it seems, only in the absence of fools.
mathematician
Mathematicians start with axioms and draw consequences, theorems. Physicists have theorems or facts, observed by experiment, and they are looking for axioms, that is to say, laws of physics, backwards. So in physics the idea is to deduce this system of laws or axioms from which the observed things would follow.
mathematics
Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.
Matt Haig
Matter is less material and mind is less spiritual than is generally supposed. The habitual separation of physics and psychology, mind and matter is metaphysically indefensible.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Max Planck
May Swenson
May Swenson: Self-Portrait
Maya Angelou
Maybe we cannot know the real reason why we are crying. Maybe we do not cry about, but rather near or around. Maybe all our explanations are stories constructed after the fact. Not just stories. I won’t say just.
Meaning in life, as an antidote to suffering and malevolence, is to be found in responsibility.
Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life...
meaning of life
Measuring program and programmer effectiveness by lines of code is like measuring aircraft effectiveness by weight.
Media distort reality and breed pessimism. We need optimism for more health, happiness, and success. We need freedom from the press to get there.
Meditation (and Mindfulness) is the art of fully conscious living. What we make of our life—the sum total of thoughts, emotions, words, and actions that fill the brief interval between birth and death—is our one great creative masterpiece. The beauty and significance of a life well lived consists not in the works we leave behind, or in what history has to say about us. It comes from the quality of conscious experience that infuses our every waking moment, and from the impact we have on others.
Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It's about feeling the way you feel.
Melvin Konner
Memory is the seamstress (and a capricious one at that), who threads our lives together.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
Meno
Meta-induction is the idea that, because we now know scientific theories of yore have often been wrong, it’s safe to assume our own present-day theories are quite possibly wrong as well...
Michael Crichton
Michael Shermer
Michael Spooner
Michel de Montaigne
Miguel de Unamuno
Mike Rowe
Milan Kundera
mindfulness
minister
Miracles ... seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.
Misery is almost always the result of thinking.
Missing and going
Mister, I don't sell to fish.
Mitchel Resnick
Mohandas Gandhi
Mohsin Hamid
Moliere
Molly Ivins
Mona Simpson
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
Moon myth and reality
morality
Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.
More aware of just how much can go wrong, every day that goes by without a crisis feels like a blessing.
More Is Different - Electronic computers are a magnificent example of emergence.
Morgan Housel
Morgenbesser to B.F. Skinner: ‘So, you’re telling me it’s wrong to anthropomorphise humans?
Most good is hard. Most evil is easy. Dying, giving up, losing, cheating, and mediocrity is easy. Stay away from the evil easy.
Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.
Most of our days we do not perceive beginnings and endings; births and deaths feel blessedly far away, we find ourselves almost always in the middle of things.
Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, but by people being fundamentally people.
Most of the time, a person sits down at her personal computer not to create, but to read, observe, study, explore, make cognitive connections, and ultimately come to an understanding. This person is not seeking to make her mark upon the world, but to rearrange her own neurons. The computer becomes a medium for asking questions, making comparisons, and drawing conclusions—that is, for learning.
Most of us don’t just want simple happiness; we want intensity. We want to feel that sense of existential urgency you get when you are engrossed in some meaningful project, when you know you are doing something important and good.
Most of us have many people inside us... So let yourself be all the you’s that you are. But don’t let them crowd out the smart one... you may say you want to go to Chicago, but it’s going to be hard to get there if you keep buying tickets to Las Vegas.
Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory.
Most seeming coincidences are of "stunning insignificance".
Most teachers waste their time by asking questions that are intended to discover what a pupil does not know, whereas the true art of questioning is to discover what the pupil does know or is capable of knowing.
Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.
Mother - Ursula K. Le Guin
Mother Teresa
Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.
multiple authors
Muriel Rukeyser
Murray Gell-Mann
music
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
My birth: “Although present on that occasion I have no clear recollection of the events leading up to it.”
My car-ma ran over your dog-ma.
My congratulations to you, sir. Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
My experience is what I agree to attend to, and only those things which I notice shape my mind.
My favorite time to work is first thing in the morning. There’s a quietness then. The longer we spend in the real world during the day, the further away that imaginary world becomes.
My favourite day is today.
My Heart Leaps Up - poem by William Wordsworth
My identity is maintained by the struggle of wanting something other than what is; that is how I continue to know myself.
My job was to communicate my own energy and belief in the importance of the work. I had it pretty easy. I wrote my syllabus, and thus chose work that I loved. If the syllabus wasn't working, I could make a change as we went.
My Left Left - poem by Kenn Nesbitt
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
My old clock used to tell the time and subdivide diurnity; but now it's lost both hands and chime and only tells eternity.
My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose... I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.
Mysticism is to be commended as an attitude towards life, not as a creed about the world…
Myth and magic occupy as much room on its shelves as law and philosophy: Jewish religion—and, more broadly, Jewish culture—contain the rational and the irrational.
Myths are things that never happened, but always are.
Nan Shepherd
Nancy Sherman
Naomi Shihab Nye
Napoleon Bonaparte
Nassim Taleb
Nathan Heflick
Nathanial Bodwitch
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel S. Borenstein
nature
Nature is only a part of what we can imagine; everything, real or imagined, can be appraised by us, and there is no outside standard to show that our valuation is wrong. We are ourselves the ultimate and irrefutable arbiters of value, and in the world of value Nature is only a part.
Nature may answer a question with a Yes or a No, but it whispers one answer and thunders the other, its Yes is provisional, its No is definitive.
Nature speaks to those who disappear into it.
Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Neil Gaiman
Neil Postman
Neil Postman Quotes
Neither acquiescence in skepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce. What it should produce is a belief that knowledge is attainable in a measure, though with difficulty; that much of what passes for knowledge at any given time is likely to be more or less mistaken, but that the mistakes can be rectified by care and industry. In acting upon our beliefs, we should be very cautious where a small error would mean disaster; nevertheless it is upon our beliefs that we must act.
Neither noise nor information is predictable. Noise is inherently unpredictable, but carries no information. Information, however, is also unpredictable. If we can predict future data from past data, then that future data stops being information.
Nell Stevens
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Never express yourself more clearly than you think.
Never follow your passion, but always bring it along.
Never give in. Never, never, never, never – in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense.
Never let a crisis go to waste.
Never trouble another for what you can do for yourself.
Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.
New word definitions - from the Washington Post Style Invitational
Nicholas Kemp
Nick Bostrom
Nick Laird
Niels Bohr
Nir Eyal
No choice recurs. We may get similar choices again, but never that exact one. Hesitation—inaction—is just as irrevocable as action. What the motorist, locked on the one-way road, is to space, we are to the fourth dimension: we truly pass this way but once.
No cow's like a horse, and no horse like a cow. That's one similarity anyhow.
No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.
No matter how bad things get, you got to go on living, even if it kills you.
No one really survives a real conversation with something/someone other than themselves, and no one survives a real pilgrimage if one is sincere. The person who arrives is never the same person who began it in the first place.
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.
No Time - poem by Billy Collins
No work, no idea, stands alone, but that all good, true and beautiful things are networks, ecosystems of intertwingled parts, related entities and similar works.
Nobody teaches life anything.
Noel Coward
Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.
Nora Ephron
Norbert Wiener
Norman Fischer
Not all questions are answered, but fortunately some answers are questioned.
Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.
Not far from here, by a white sun, behind a green star, lived the Steelypips, illustrious, industrious, and they hadn’t a care: no spats in their vats, no rules, no schools, no gloom, no evil influence of the moon, no trouble from matter or antimatter ...
Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.
Not knowing is most intimate. Not-knowing should not be confused with ignorance. Not-knowing is not the removal of knowing but its deep reevaluation.
Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
Nothing can be made foolproof because fools are so damn ingenious.
Nothing Gold Can Stay - poem by Robert Frost
Nothing happens in contradiction to nature, only in contradiction to what we know of it, and that's a place to start. That's where the hope is.
Nothing is lacking - this page intentionally left blank
Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when it is the only idea we have.
Nothing Twice - poem by Wislawa Szymborska
Nothing will tell you where you are. Each moment is a place you’ve never been.
Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan.
Novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.
Now, this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.
Nowadays, kindergarten is becoming more and more like school. The rest of school should become more like kindergarten.
Numberless... are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections color and infect the understanding.
O, but they say the tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony. Where words are scarce they are seldom spent in vein, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.
Observation, like a flame of attention, wipes away hate.
Obvious reality (by definition :)
Obviously, our memories are not reliable—and yet they still tend to tell us something emotionally true, even when they’re not real.
Occam’s Razor tersely captured: that which requires less to explain more is better.
Octavia E. Butler
Odes - poem by Fernando Pessoa
Of all the things you might do in your final ten minutes, it is pretty safe to bet that few of them are things you actually did today.
Of course God is personal, because we are persons.
Of course there may be many, many things in the world which we do not yet perceive either directly through our senses or with the aid of our wonderful inventions. And so it would be Quite arrogant to speak as if we knew what the outside world "really" is. That is why I wish to give to "Science" a modest interpretation and emphasize that it deals merely with that PART of the OUTSIDE world which we are able to contact, — and therefore "Science" has a "human" element in it.
Often I believe I’m working toward a result, but always, once I reach the result, I realize that all the pleasure was in planning and executing the path to that result. It comforts me that endings are thus formally unappealing to me—that more than beginning or ending, I enjoy continuing.
Often it's just a short swim from the shipwreck of your life to the island paradise of your dreams, assuming you don't drown in the metaphor.
Often when you think you're at the end of something, you're at the beginning of something else.
Often, throwing the baby with the bath water is throwing out too much.
Old ... never die, they merely...
Old Age - poem by Julia Wiener
Old or young, we're on our last cruise.
Old people, with other old people, are not so old.
Oliver Burkeman
Oliver Sacks
Oliver Wendell Holmes
On "Deep Play"
On a long journey of human life, faith is the best of companions; it is the best refreshment on the journey; and it is the greatest property.
On a successful, life-long vacation
On Bean counting - poem inspired by Rebecca Elson
On Bricolage in programming
On collecting and collectors
On Conceptual Integrity and human character
On Creative Artificial Intelligence
On deep reading and looking for Redeeming Value
On Equity Language
On free will and law and order
On free will and randomness
On good writing (and coding)
On how one orients himself to the moment depends the failure or fruitfulness of it.
On Indexes and Indexing
On metaphors for the brain and the Extended Mind
On Negative vs. Positive Freedom
On not giving up: 'You should give up.' 'Why?' 'For one thing, you'll live longer.' 'Oh, you don't live longer. It just seems longer.'
On our anthropomorfic perception
On our progeny: They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge … no Gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command … But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young.
On Palindromes - by Jasper Fforde
On programming: The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.
On purity of thoughts and the need to guard ones mind
On Reason and Passion - poem by Kahlil Gibran
On Scientific Progress - by Jasper Fforde
On solitude as an ethical intelligence
On Talking - poem by Kahlil Gibran
On tech noise - past and present
On the "uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind"
On the difference between intelligence and reason: Intelligence is a razor blade, reason wields it. It is the hand that determines in which direction the blade is pointing.
On the nature of God
On the nature of knowledge - Fallibilism
On the nature of science
On the nature of Self
On the other hand, you have different fingers.
On the perfect aptness of words
On The Shallowness of Google Translate
On the strange human loop
On the universality and practicality of mathematics
On torquing expressions into new meanings
On Truth: Truth is as impossible to be soiled by any outward touch as the sunbeam...
On Work - poem by Kahlil Gibran
Once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally to those who have no business with it; it doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong. And when it is ill treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parents to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself.
Once someone asked a monastic, “Do you agree with your teacher or not?” And the monastic responded, “I half agree.” “Why only half?” “If I agreed completely then I would be ungrateful.”
Once we are successful, the forces that challenge and assail our integrity are far more subtle. There is nothing to rob the human spirit like the rewards of an upper-middle-class existence... and (the feeling) that any desire, large or small, can be obtained through a toll-free number.
Once we leave out the “and”, then it’s way easier to do what we said we wanted to do.
Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.
One cannot be honest even at the end of one’s life, for no one is wholly alone. We are bound to those we love, or to those who love us, and to those who need us to be brave, or content, or even happy enough to allow them not to worry about us. So we must refrain from giving pain, as our last gift to our fellows.
One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.
One doesn’t arrive — in words or in art — by necessarily knowing where one is going...
One gift of aging is the precipitous decline in melodrama. Enjoying how unremarkable life is takes practice and time, and then the little things start to shine and delight. Life gets smaller and in its smallness it starts winking at you.
One loses, in the study of cause and effect, that absurd air which so many people have of being always shocked and pained by the curiousness of life. Such people live amid human nature as if human nature were a foreign country full of awful foreign customs. But, having reached maturity, one ought surely to be ashamed of being a stranger in a strange land!
One man is more concerned with the impression he makes on the rest of mankind, another with the impression the rest of mankind makes on him.
One may call the world a myth, in which bodies and things are visible, but souls and minds hidden. Besides, to wish to teach the whole truth about the Gods to all produces contempt in the foolish, because they cannot understand, and lack of zeal in the good, whereas to conceal the truth by myths prevents the contempt of the foolish, and compels the good to practice philosophy.
One moon shows in every pool; in every pool, the one moon.
One need only grow old to become gentler in one’s judgments. I see no fault committed which I could not have committed myself.
One of the best ways to make myself happy is to make other people happy; one of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy myself.
One of the greatest indicators of our own spiritual maturity is revealed in how we respond to the weaknesses, the inexperience and the potentially offensive actions of others.
One of the keys to good decision making is having a well-calibrated sense of your future regret.
One of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.
One of the secrets to happiness: It’s better to consume humor than to supply it. It’s also a lot easier.
One of the ways sentences can surprise their maker, please their reader, and uncover something new is that they get to the sense they make by other than ordinary logical means.
One person's constant is another person's variable.
One should not produce something just because it is a novelty. New form without important content is worse than no form at all.
One should write Odes... Short exercises in gratitude. Or in attention, which may in the end be the same thing.
One wondered what it was like, spending your whole life doing something you didn’t want to do. Like being dead, maybe, only worse, the reason being, you were alive to suffer it.
One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.
One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion.
Only in silence the word, Only in dark the light, Only in dying life: Bright the hawk’s flight On the empty sky.
Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.
Ontological argument: Inconceivability proves God's existence
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming: feedback is the treatment.
Optimism is, in the first instance, a way of explaining failure, not prophesying success. It says that there is no fundamental barrier, no law of nature or supernatural decree, preventing progress.
Oscar Mandel
Oscar Wilde
Our attention (and mind) is like a marble atop a piece of wet soap; if you are not mindful and vigilant, it slips.
Our brains govern a process that over time creates an autobiography. Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don't spin them. They spin us.
Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.
Our culture is the first in a couple generations that attempts to have funerals with no bodies. We just disappear them... But the way to deal with mortality is by dealing with the mortals... you deal with death by dealing with the dead thing.
Our growth depends not on how many experiences we devour, but on how many we digest.
Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction.
Our highest human calling is to help repair the part of the world that we can see and touch.
Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality, for reality is an illusion of the daylight — the light of our particular day.
Our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end... Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility... If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly.
Our so-called limitations, I believe, apply to faculties we don't apply. We don't discover what we can't achieve until we make an effort not to try.
Our unlived lives - Missing Out
Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature. Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems - vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.
Our worldview is literally shaped by time
Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.
Owen Flanagan
P.M. Forni
Pablo Picasso
Padmasambhava
Parenting and education reform are about sustained effort over long periods of time. You get there by keeping being there.
Parker Palmer
Part of being human
Part of the work of being a modern person seems to be dreaming of alternate lives in which you don't have to dream of alternate lives. We long to stop longing.
Pascal's Wager
Passion does not guarantee success.
Passion, like discriminating taste, grows on its use. You more likely act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action.
patience
Paul Boese
Paul Broks
Paul Celan
Paul Erdos
Paul Fleischman
Paul Goodman
Paul Graham
Paul Jun
Paul Klee
Paul Linke
Paul Lockhart
Paul Nahin
Paul Valery
Paulo Coelho
Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules. To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry. … To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery.
Peggy Noonan
People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.
People can be wrong in the present when they say they were wrong in the past.
People can probably only understand the worth of doing something if it has a purpose. My present attitude is that the purpose of having a purpose is so that we can have a fulfilling journey.
People confuse programming with coding. Coding is to programming what typing is to writing... If people are trying to learn programming by being taught to code, it's like they are being taught writing by being taught how to type. And that doesn't make much sense.
People don't always buy what they need, but they always desire what they buy, even if the desire is only transitory. However, by clarifying their desires, people sometimes clarify what they really need and don't need.
People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
People sometimes ask me what is the Buddhist view of this or that. But there is no Buddhist view of this or that. The Buddhist view is a nonview, but not a nonview that is the opposite of a view, a wishy-washy noncommittalism. Nonview includes various views that arise in response to conditions. Nonview is an attitude, a spirit of openness, kindness, and flexibility with regard to language. Nonview is a way to stand within language, to make use of language so as to connect, without being caught by and separated from the world and others by language.
People tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity.
People who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Perfect - poem by Kenn Nesbitt
Perfection is a fragile, ice-thin ground that barely holds our human weight
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think
Perseus's strength always lies in a refusal to look directly, but not in a refusal of the reality in which he is fated to live; he carries the reality with him and accepts it as his particular burden.
Persi Diaconis
Pessimism is stupid. When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.
Pete Goodliffe
Pete Seeger
Peter Cook
Peter De Vries
Peter Drucker
Peter Sjöstedt-H
Peter Wang
Phaedrus
Phil Stutz
Philip Goff
Philip K. Dick
Philo of Alexandria
philosopher
Philosophical subjects should never be taught with authority. They are not established sciences; they are full of disputed matters, and open questions, and bottomless speculations. It is not the function of the teacher to settle philosophical and political controversies for the pupil, or even to recommend to him any one set of opinions as better than another. Exposition, not imposition, of opinions is the professor's part.
philosophy
physician
physicist
physics
Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.
Physics, my friend, is a narrow path drawn across a gulf that the human imagination cannot grasp. It is a set of answers to certain questions that we put to the world, and the world supplies the answers on the condition that we will not then ask it other questions, questions shouted out by common sense ...
Pi R squared
Pico Iyer
Piere-Simon Laplace
Piet Hein
Plato
Play is one of our highest forms of adaptation.
Play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it.
poem
Poem - by Norman Fischer
Poem - Possibilities - by Wislawa Szymborska
Poem - The Shortness of Life Prevents Us from Undertaking Long Hopes
poem by הלילה הוא שירים - תרצה אתר
Poem: Out of the cradle onto dry land here it is standing: atoms with consciousness; matter with curiosity. Stands at the sea, wonders at wondering: I a universe of atoms an atom in the Universe.
poet
poetry
Poetry is a diary kept by a sea creature who lives on land and wishes he could fly.
Poetry is the attempt to understand fully what is real, what is present, what is imaginable, what is feelable, and how you can loosen the grip of what you already know, to find some new, changed relationship, to find something you didn’t know until the poem was written and finished? And then you know something new, and you have been changed.
politician
politics
Possession is nine parts of the law when what you possess is a knife.
prayer
Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.
Precision and correctness are like opposing forces. It’s easy to satisfy one if you ignore the other. The converse of vaporous academic writing is the bold, but false, rhetoric of demagogues.
Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.
Premonitions are impossible, and yet they come true all the time.
Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity.
president
Primo Levi
Problems with the Meme
Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back.
Processes are not ‘things’ changing, but ‘things’ are movements abstracted.
procrastination (a round tuit)
Profound essays are often contrarian in method and spirit. They assert, in one way or another, that the prevailing view of things can be assumed to be wrong, and that its opposite, being its image or shadow, can also be assumed to be wrong. They undertake to demonstrate that there are other ways of thinking, for which better arguments can be made.
Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!
programming
Programming Data Structures
Programming is the purest form of poetry. Poetry is the art of deriving maximum power and meaning from words. That’s what a beautiful program does.
Programming is the use of a notation to express the future behavior of a computer.
Programming Quotes
Programs as webs - not top-down nor bottom-up
Proposing questions such as what was there before the Big Bang is like standing at the South Pole and asking which way is south. Earlier times simply would not be defined.
Prove the Cat Theorem, which states that A cat has nine tails...
psychologist
psychology
Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. It’s the only way to make progress. That, and, of course, moving with the times.
Puns point to the essence of all true wit—the ability to hold in the mind two different ideas about the same thing at the same time.
Q: complete the sentence: "Practice makes p____t."
Q: Why did the functions stop calling each other? A: Because they had constant arguments.
Quae ferrum non sanant, ignis sanat; quae ignis non sanat, tempo sanat
Quality is the source of subjects and objects; subjects and objects are not the source of quality.
Quarantine - Poem by Eavan Boland
Queen Elizabeth II
Question - poem by May Swenson
Questions are a mighty form of words.
Questions elicit answers in their likeness... it's almost impossible to meet a simplistic question with anything but a simplistic answer... and it's almost impossible to resist a generous question.
quote
Quote Authors
Quote Categories
quotes
rabbi
Rabbi Akiva
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov
Rabbi Tarfon
Rabindranath Tagore
Rachel McAnallen
Rachel Naomi Remen
Rahm Emanuel
Rainer Maria Rilke
Ralph Sockman
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ram Dass
Randall Jarrell
Randall Munroe
Ranulph Glanville
Rather than aiming for a room with a view, why not aim for a view with some room?
RationalShinkai
Ray Bradbury
Ray Kurzweil
Ray Manzarek
Raymond Joseph Teller
Raymond Smullyan
Reader, I think proper, before we proceed any farther together, to acquaint thee that I intend to digress, through this whole history, as often as I see occasion, of which I am myself a better judge than any pitiful critic.
reading
Reading can teach you the best of what others already know. Reflection can teach you the best of what only you can know.
Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.
Reading the Bible
Reading the signs
Real life isn't a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way. That's a deep truth about the structure of our universe. But, for some reason, we insist on behaving as if it were not true.
Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.
Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.
Real teaching is not about transferring "the material", as if knowledge were some sort of mass-produced commodity that ships from Amazon. Real teaching is about conveying a way of thinking. How can a teacher convey a way of thinking when he doesn't genuinely think that way?
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends on what we look for. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.
Realize that now, in this moment of time, you are creating. You are creating your next moment based on what you are feeling and thinking. That is what’s real. We can let go of the unconscious belief that being anxious about the past or the future will somehow protect us and instead reprogram our cells with new ways of responding.
Really new ideas are incomprehensible. The good news is that for some people, failure to comprehend is the beginning of understanding. For most, of course, it is the beginning of dismissal.
Rebecca Elson
Rebecca Goldstein
Recipe for hope/optimism: Adversity is temporary, it is isolated to only a part of your life, and it can be overcome by your effort.
Recursion is the root of computation since it trades description for time.
Redeeming Value
Redeeming Value is the striving and activities of a person, driven by the belief and the idea that the self is to be refined by exposure to things that are wonderful and difficult and imbued with what is sometimes call "the human spirit".
Reductio ad absurdum and indirect proof are different but related procedures...
Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.
Reduction! One wants to say more than nature and one makes the impossible mistake of wanting to say it with more means than she, instead of fewer.
Reflection in Water - poem by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Refugees - poem by Brian Bilston
regex search
Reginald Horace Blyth
Reinhold Niebuhr
Relationship is understanding. It is a process of self-revelation. Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself -- to be is to be related.
Relatively speaking
religion
Religion as defined by the great sages of India, China, and the Middle East was not a notional activity but a practical one; it did not require belief in a set of doctrines but rather hard, disciplined work, without which any religious teaching remained opaque and incredible.
Religion belonged to the infancy of the human race; it had been a necessary stage in the transition from childhood to maturity. It had promoted ethical values which were essential to society. Now that humanity had come of age, however, it should be left behind.
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
Religion is a human projection of humanity's conceptions of beauty, goodness, power, and other valued things, a humanizing of experience by understanding it as structured around and mirroring back these values.
Religion is an evolved, biologically grounded, psychologically intimate, socially strong set of inclinations and ideas that are not universal but are widespread and deeply ingrained.
religious leader
Reluctance - poem by Robert Frost
Remember that nothing has inherent color, that color is not a property of objects but of the light that falls upon them, reflected back. So too with the light of the mind — it is attention that gives the world its vibrancy, its kaleidoscopic beauty. The quality of attention we pay something or someone is the measure of our aliveness.
Remember, any lie you are told, even deliberately, is often a more significant fact than a truth told in all sincerity.
Remember: it is not difficult to be aware – it is just difficult to do it continuously!
René Daumal
Rene Descartes
Rene Magritte
Restoring a caring connection when it is disrupted, and maintaining it when it is present, is happiness. Not even, leads to happiness. Equals happiness.
Returning home is the most difficult part of long-distance hiking; You have grown outside the puzzle and your piece no longer fits.
Revenge may be wicked, but it’s natural.
Reversing Entropy
Rewriting is an act of war: If something needs to be rewritten then it needs to be destroyed. The enemy in that war is yourself.
Richard Bach
Richard Davidson
Richard Dawkins
Richard Diebenkorn
Richard Diebenkorn on creativity
Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman on Science vs. Religion
Richard Ford
Richard Hamming
Richard Lewontin
Richard Matheson
Richard Rorty
Rick Justice
Riley Moynes
Rippling as the idea that each of us creates circles of influence all around us that, like ripples in a pond, reverberate throughout the world. The influence we have had is often conscious, but it is also something we cannot be aware of because it is impossible to know all the ways we have rippled. In this way, we leave a part of ourselves that endures after we have died.
Risk - poem by Anais Nin
Risk Assessment
Rita Dove
Robert Benchley
Robert Brault
Robert Brault Quotes
Robert Caro
Robert Frost
Robert Graves
Robert Laughlin
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Martin
Robert Osserman
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Pirsig
Robert Thurman
Robert Townsend
Robert Wright
Robin Givhan
Rodney Brooks
Roger Penrose
Roger Schank
Roger Scruton
Roger Zelazny
Rollo May
Romanticizing the loss of jobs to technology is little better than complaining that antibiotics put too many grave diggers out of work.
Ronald Graham
Ross Douthat
Roy Amara
Rudyard Kipling
Rules for Life - by Jordan Peterson
Rumi
Russ Roberts
Russell Edson
Ruth Ozeki
Saepe Fallor Nunquam in Dubio. Often Mistaken, Never in Doubt.
Saint Augustine
Sallustius
Sam Harris
Sam Knight
Sam Walter Foss
Samuel Johnson
Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis)
Sara Jenkins
Sarah Kay
Sarah Manguso
Sarah Perry
Satan
Satya Nadella
Saunders on Chekhov: Is happiness a blessing or a curse?
Savas Dimopoulos
Save and savor contradictory ideas
Say not always what you know, but always know what you say.
Sayadaw U Tejaniya
Scepticism is always a back road leading to some credo or other.
scholar
science
Science advances one funeral at a time.
Science and Religion as Human Telling
Science and religion, like the lion and the lamb, seldom lie down together. But when a scientist stumbles upon a plausible unifying principle behind the world's workings -- Darwin upon natural selection, say, or Einstein upon relativity -- he transforms himself from searcher into believer.
Science deals with falsifiable hypotheses. Any hypothesis that is not even theoretically falsifiable is not wrong – it’s not even wrong. It’s not science.
Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe. We need the languages of both science and poetry to save us from merely stockpiling endless “information” that fails to inform our ignorance or our irresponsibility.
Science does not foreclose possibility, including discoveries that overturn fundamental assumptions, and that it is not a final statement about reality but a highly fruitful mode of inquiry into it.
Science does not reveal the meaning of our existence, but it does draw back some of the veils.
Science groups and arranges its truths so as to enable us to take in at one view as much as possible of the general order of the universe. Art... brings together from parts of the field of science most remote from one another, the truths relating to the production of the different and heterogeneous conditions necessary to each effect which the exigencies of practical life require.
Science is a belief in the ignorance of experts.
Science is an inherent contradiction — systematic wonder — applied to the natural world.
Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it.
Science is not physics, biology, or chemistry -- is not even a "subject" -- but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning.
Science is the conversation about how the world is. Culture is the conversation about how else the world could be, and how else we could experience it.
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do. Science advances whenever an Art becomes a Science. And the state of the Art advances too, because people always leap into new territory once they have understood more about the old. This book (and Computing) will help you reach new frontiers.
Science provides an understanding of a universal experience, and arts provide a universal understanding of a personal experience.
Scientific knowledge is tested by observation, not derived from it.
Scientific knowledge only adds to the appreciation of beauty; it does not subtract.
Scientific Playfulness
Scientism's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors.
scientist
Scientists build to learn; Engineers learn to build.
Scott Adams
Scott Corbett
Scott Russell Sanders
Searching for a quote
Seaside Canon - a palindromic poem by Julia Galef
Seb Paquet
Seek people who love and give generously, who have the strength to suffer without causing damage. Only strong people are safe people, the measure of strength being not the absence of vulnerability, but the ability to carry one’s vulnerability with such self-awareness and valor so as not to harm other lives.
Seeming is more important than being, since it shapes the human condition, and embodies within itself all the aspects of the world that make our lives worthwhile.
Self-evident truth
Send in the Clowns - song lyrics
Seneca
serenity
Seth Godin
Seven Wonders of the World (so Meta)
Seymour Papert
Seymour Sarason
Shalom Aleichem
Shaping of a Beautiful Mind: You can actually practice shaping a mind which is constantly enlarging the context, and becoming more generous, and more in contact with the frontier which is the unknown.
Sharon Salzberg
Shawna Lemay
She had never been at home with words. She collected silence like other people collected string. But she had a way of saying nothing that said it all.
She slipped from our fingers like a flake gathered by the wind, and is now part of the drift called "the infinite." We don’t know where she is, though so many tell us.
She was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world’s great creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it.
Shel Silverstein
Sherry Turkle
Sherwin Nuland
Shimon Edelman
Shinto - poem by Jorge Luis Borges
Shmuel Yosef Agnon
Short Poems - Billy Collins
Should we stop reading into authors' lives and get back to their books?
Shriram Krishnamurthi
Shunryu Suzuki
Sidney Morgenbesser
Sigmund Freud
Silence is like a cradle holding our endeavors and our will; a silent spaciousness sustains us in our work and at the same time connects us to larger worlds that, in the busyness of our daily struggle to achieve, we have not yet investigated. Silence is the soul's break for freedom.
Silence is so accurate.
Simone de Beauvoir
Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.
Simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability.
Simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures. Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being. Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are. Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.
Since any comprehensible entity is, by complexity theory, of less complexity than we are, such an entity is not, for that very reason, an appropriate deity-like entity. People generally don't worship that which is simpler than they are. This natural reluctance to deify the simple (except possibly as a symbol) is consistent with a tendency among some to identify God with the great unfathomable, the incomprehensibly complex. Reversing the letters in God and the lines of this thought, we note that it is also consistent with a dog's deifying its master (assuming, that is, that the master is of greater complexity than the dog).
Since the dawn of humanity, religions had asserted without proof that the human soul would live on after the body rotted away. The human voice was a thing almost as insubstantial as the soul, but it was a product of the body and therefore must die too... But here now were echoes made hard.
Sir Arthur Eddington was once asked if it's true that only three people in the world understood general relativity. He replied, “Who is the third?”
Sky - poem by Maggie Smith
Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.
Smart is not something that you just are, smart is something that you can get.
So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.
So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
So it goes.
So many times
So Much From So Little? Now That Explains A Lot!
So while Western therapeutic approaches mostly give us strategies to feel less pain, Buddhism teaches us to be more open to what we’re feeling, even if it’s pain, without grasping for something other than what life presents in this very moment. In this way, pain transforms into a form of intensity or energy.
Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.
social worker
Socrates
soft-minded practice and not making too many home-made cookies
Software inefficiency and inelegance will always expand to the level made tolerable by Moore's Law... Whether Small Information wants to be free or expensive, Big Information wants to be meaningless.
Software is the hidden writing that whispers the stories of possibility to our hardware. And here's the exciting thing: we're the storytellers. We are the ones who are in a place where we can tell those new stories. We have the opportunity, we have the privilege, we have the responsibility, to tell the stories that change the world. What an exciting place to be in!
Software is the invisible thread and hardware is the loom on which we weave the fabric of computing.
Software may be such stuff as dreams are made on, but it runs in the physical world.
Some "philosophical questions" are a misuse of words in that the questions sound sensible but are actually meaningless... Nevertheless, wonder is not a disease. Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead -- when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead.
Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we knew it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we did not know.
Some drink deeply from the river of knowledge… others only gargle.
Some learn about death earlier than others, and this sets them apart. Such people do not necessarily show a bleak face to the world. Rather, they take what they grasp about life with them into happier occasions, quietly aware of what can be torn away from them at any moment. Their consciousness of transience accompanies them in everything they do and wherever they go for the rest of their lives.
Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to believe in what they understand.
Some men went fishing in the sea with a net, and upon examining what they caught they concluded that there was a minimum size to the fish in the sea.
Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.
Some people don’t have intelligence. They have “thintelligence.” They see the immediate situation. They think narrowly and they call it “being focused.” They don’t see the surround. They don’t see the consequences.
Some people have got a mental horizon of radius zero and call it their point of view.
Some people just can’t help themselves. The Germans call it schadenfreude. Others called it human nature—which is just a fancy term for the God-given flaws we have no intention of giving back.
Some people write poetry in the language we speak. Perhaps better poetry will be written in the language of digital computers of the future than has ever been written in English.
Some say that all the trouble is because the world is divided into rich and poor. Maybe this thing is trouble. In any case, not the main trouble, the main trouble is that everything comes with pain.
Some similarities of a general sort between mathematics and humor.
Someday I might read about some of the moments I’ve forgotten, moments I’ve allowed myself to forget, that my brain was designed to forget, that I’ll be glad to have forgotten and be glad to rediscover as writing. The experience is no longer experience. It is reading. (That's why) I am still writing.
Sometimes - by David Whyte
Sometimes quantity becomes quality.
Sometimes the view of Earth from another planet can give insights otherwise unattainable.
Sometimes you hear Zen teachers say that a liberated mind is neither active nor passive. In other words, conceptual contradictions don’t have to be contradictory in your experience.
Song of Joy
Sonia Jackson
Sonnet X from Huntsman, What Quarry? - poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Sonny
Soren Kierkegaard
Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.
Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both.
Spiderweb - poem by Kay Ryan
spirituality
Spirituality is not having the answers before you ask the questions, but rather asking the questions and being open to what the answers might be.
Spirituality is not primarily about values and ethics, not about exhortations to do right or live well. The spiritual traditions are primarily about reality...an effort to penetrate the illusions of the external world and to name its underlying truth.
sport
sportsperson
Spring: trees flying up to their birds.
St. Francis of Assisi
Stanislaus Lec
Stanislaw Lem
Stanislaw Ulam
Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kunitz
Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
Step with care and great tact, and remember that Life's a Great Balancing Act.
Stephen Batchelor
Stephen Berry
Stephen Fry
Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking once hosted a party for time travelers, announcing it only after the fact. Nobody came.
Stephen J. Gould
Stephen Marche
Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Wolfram
Steve Hagen
Steve Jobs
Steven Novella
Steven Pinker
Steven Weinberg
Steven Wright
Stewart Alsop
Stewart Brand
Stop telling God what to do with his dice.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening - poem by Robert Frost
Stories become a physical part of us. They become encoded somehow into fragments of mental routines capable of generating them at will, and, if integrated into our conceptual and emotional maps of the world, they change us forever. We are the stories we tell.
Story of your life - Ted Chiang
Stuart A. Kauffman
Stuart Firestein
Studs Terkel
Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow.
Sudden Light (I have been here before) - poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Sue Fitzmaurice
Superintelligence saturates the universe
Suppose I understood everything about how the brain works. I couldn't possibly visualize its processes. Just to count the connections in the cortex at one per second would take 32 million years. For brain theory, you need computers. They're like pigment for a painter.
Surely astonishment and wonder are what we feel on encountering something that differs from what is normal, or at least from what is for some reason or other expected. But this whole world is something we encounter only once. We have nothing with which to compare it, and it is impossible to see how we can approach it with any particular expectation. And yet we are astonished; we are puzzled by what we find, yet are unable to say what we should have to have found in order not to be surprised, or how the world would have to have been constructed in order not to constitute a riddle!
Suresh Venkatasubramanian
surgeon
Susan Blackmore
Susan Gerhart
Susan Griffin
Susan Moon
Susan Sontag
Susanna Clarke
Susanne Langer
Sven Schnieders
Swami Prajnanpad
Sydney J. Harris
Sydney Smith
Sylvia Boorstein
Sylvia Mark
Symmetry may have its appeal, but it's inherently stale. Some kind of imbalance is behind every transformation.
T. S. Eliot
T.H. White
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Taizan Maezumi
Take-offs are optional, landings are mandatory.
Taking Our Places - Norman Fischer
Taking our places? according to the Pope
Talent is God given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful.
Tali Sharot
Tara Westover
Tautologies and contradictions are not real propositions, but degenerate cases. Clearly, by negating a contradiction we get a tautology, and by negating a tautology a contradiction.
Tea ceremony
Teachers are the malleable, humanizing layer between the diverse individual needs of their students and the rigid standards and specifications of the system. The teachers we lionize splay their lives across the grinding cogs of the machine for the sake of the children they serve.
Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received.
teaching
Teaching as a process
Teaching is only demonstrating that it is possible. Learning is making it possible for yourself.
Teaching is the greatest act of optimism.
Teaching reading and writing (Alan Kay on Einstein and Thoreau)
Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift rather than a hard duty.
Teaching yourself is discovering what is teachable
technology
Technology doesn’t necessarily lead to learning the same things better - it often leads to better learning about new things.
Ted Chiang
Teddy Roosevelt
Tell All The Truth But Tell It Slant - poem by Emily Dickinson
Tell the truth, nothing but the truth, but not the whole truth.
Teller
tempus fugit (time flies)
Ten Rules for Being Human
Teppo Felin
Terence
Terry Eagleton
Terry Pratchett
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Thank you very much. I have no complaints.
That a given number is the sum of two primes, I hold for a completely certain result, ignoring the fact that I myself cannot prove it.
That facts about the world are in themselves capable of shaping the brain is slowly becoming accepted. Does the unconscious only get these facts from us, or does it have the same access to our sensorium that we have?
That the birds of worry and care fly over your head, this you cannot change, but that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent.
That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
That's what the gods are! An answer that will do!
The (biblical and Kafka's) protagonists are not flat, exactly, but not round either. Like Joseph, Moses, the patriarchs and matriarchs, they don't engage in introspection, which is not to say that they lack interiority, just that we don't hear about it.
The 20th century invention of a “career” was more or less defined as one path per life, one job per life. Like a road trip with one destination in mind, with time spent finding the one highway to get you there.
The 5 Buddhist training precepts: refrain from harming, refrain from taking what is not given, refrain from false speech, refrain from sexual misconduct, refrain from needless use of intoxicants.
The ability to create and use explanatory knowledge gives people a power to transform nature which is ultimately not limited by parochial factors, as all other adaptations are, but only by universal laws. This is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge – and hence of people, whom I shall henceforward define as entities that can create explanatory knowledge.
The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary...But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them.
The act of steering ones boat down the river of time is a source of pleasure, regardless of ones port of call. You probably believe that even if the act of steering a metaphorical boat down a cliched river is a source of pleasure and well-being, where the boat goes matters much much more.
The After - poem by David Anthony Martin
The after is the before for the next during.
The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
The American idea of freedom has more to do with my freedom to do what I want than your freedom to do what you want.
The answer to the problem and the sorrow of time is one thing and one thing only: the experience of meaning.
The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest. The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness. You're so exhausted because you can't be wholehearted at what you're doing.
The Arrow and the Song - poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Art of Generous Listening: Listening is not about being quiet. The being quiet is a side-effect. Listening is about being present.
The Art Of Marriage - poem by Wilferd Arlan Peterson
The Art Of Poetry - poem by Jorge Luis Borges
The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
The asking and the answering which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame, the logic of experience to which we shall submit. History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.
The attention span of a computer is only so long as its electrical cord.
The authentic watermark running through the background of a life’s work is an arrival at generosity and, as a mark of that generosity, delight in the hopes of the young: and the giving away to them, not only of rewards that may have been earned but the reward in the secret itself, the core artistry that made the journey a journey.
The beginning is never the clear, precise end of a thread, the beginning is a long, painfully slow process that requires time and patience in order to find out in which direction it is heading, a process that feels its way along the path ahead like a blind man, the beginning is just the beginning, what came before is nigh on worthless.
The beginning of wisdom (is to) acquire wisdom, therefore with everything you possess, acquire understanding.
The beginning of wisdom is in knowing when to stop. Or maybe sometimes it’s in just stopping.
The behavioural outcome of meditation and mindfulness is choice.
The best error message is the one that never shows up.
The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.
The best kinds of freedom involve choosing your constraints wisely and claiming them as your own.
The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.
The Best of It - poem by Kay Ryan
The best season of your life - poem by Wumen Huikai
The best solutions to problems lie in the category "I didn't know that I didn't know," which means eliminating blind spots is more important than problem solving. Blindspots constrain your view of what is even a problem, not to mention what is possible as a solution.
The best way to make dreams come true is to wake up.
The best way to overcome the fear of death
The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.
The best we can do (to achieve happiness) is to get the right relationship between ourselves and others, between ourselves and our work, and between ourselves and something larger than ourselves.
The better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better.
The better you tell an old story, the more you are talking about right now.
The body is inhabited in a different way when we are alone than when we are with others. Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement.
The brain is locked in total darkness, of course. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement.
The Brain—is wider than the Sky - poem by Emily Dickinson
The brutal meritocracy has become such an all-embracing cosmos, many of us have trouble thinking outside of it. From an early age, the pressure is always on to win gold stars, to advance, optimize, impress. That endless quest for success can come at the expense of true learning.
The business of asking somebody, "Why did you do that?" and the person being able to answer, is the key to responsibility. And in fact, the word, "responsibility," sort of wears its meaning on its sleeve. We are responsible because we can respond to challenges to (and questions about) our reasons. Why? Because we don't just act for reasons, we act for reasons that we consciously represent to ourselves. And this is what gives us the power and the obligation to think ahead, to anticipate, to see the consequences of our action. To be able to evaluate those consequences in the light of what other people tell us. To share our wisdom with each other.
The butterfly's attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motives contribute to it...
The Calf-Path - poem by Sam Walter Foss
The capacity to feel love more than consciousness is the universal presence. Our feeling of love is actually a sense of that generativity when we can look at another person and see that they can be something more than they are and more than just what we are.
The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.
The chief beauty about the constant supply of time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoilt, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your life.
The code you write makes you a programmer. The code you delete makes you a good one. The code you don't have to write makes you a great one.
The computer is a medium of human expression and if it has not yet had its Shakespeares, its Michelangelos or its Einsteins, it will.
The computer is an instrument whose music is ideas.
The contour of what we know is a mere silhouette cast by the infinite light of the unknown against the screen of the knowable.
The contributions of Muslim scientists typically occurred in spite of Islam rather than because of it. Orthodox Islamic scholars absolutely rejected any conception of the universe that involved consistent physical laws, because the absolute autonomy of Allah could not be restricted by natural laws. . . . Catholicism admits the possibility of miracles and acknowledges the role of the supernatural, but the very idea of a miracle suggests that the event in question is unusual, and of course it is only against the backdrop of an orderly natural world that a miracle can be recognized in the first place.
The conversational nature of reality - whatever you desire of the world will not come to pass exactly as you will like it. But the other mercy is that whatever the world desires of you will also not come to pass, and what actually occurs is this meeting, this frontier.
The conversational nature of reality is the fact that whatever you desire of the world ... will not happen exactly as you would like it to happen.
The core of being earnest is being intellectually honest. We're taught as children to be honest as an unselfish virtue — as a kind of sacrifice. But in fact it's a source of power too. To see new ideas, you need an exceptionally sharp eye for the truth. You're trying to see more truth than others have seen so far. And how can you have a sharp eye for the truth if you're intellectually dishonest?
The covers of this book are too far apart.
The critic may on occasion be called upon to condemn the second rate and expose the fraudulent: though that duty is secondary to the duty of discriminating praise of what is praiseworthy.
The critics of the idea of the "Accidental Universe" miss the fact that the meaningless cosmos that produced humans (and possibly other intelligences) will never be meaningless to them (or to the other intelligences)...
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
The dark ate the trees, leaf by leaf...
The day has pockets — you can always find time to read.
The Day is Done - poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Days are Long, But the Years are Short.
The Deliberate Practice Myth
The difference between a questioner and a doubter is that the questioner wants the truth. The doubter wants to be told there ain't such a thing.
The difference between an optimist and an incurable optimist is that an optimist says: "everything is for the best; mankind will survive." while an incurable optimist says: "everything is for the best; mankind will survive. And even if mankind doesn't survive, it is still for the best."
The Difference Between Genius And Stupidity Is That Genius Has Its Limits.
The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.
The difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is unknown.
The difficulty of translation from a language that doesn't yet exist is considerable, but there's no need to exaggerate it. The past, after all, can be quite as obscure as the future.
The difficulty of translation from another culture to yours is considerable, but there's no need to exaggerate it. Your own culture, after all, can be quite as obscure as the other.
The dignity that we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives. Ars moriendi as ars vivendi: The art of dying is the art of living. The honesty and grace of the years of life that are ending is the real measure of how we die. It is not in the last weeks or days that we compose the message that will be remembered, but in all the decades that preceded them. Who has lived in dignity, dies in dignity.
The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is ‘escapism’ an accusation of?
The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm’s way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another.
The distance between many people’s ears is a block.
The distinction between the past, the present, and the future is only an illusion, albeit a persistent one.
The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.
The DNA Molecule - poem by May Swenson
The downfall of a number of the greatest poets came from their weakness in the face of the crowds, in their weakness facing themselves. They don't have the strength to stay silent.
The dragons are avaricious, insatiable, treacherous; without pity, without remorse. But are they evil? Who am I, to judge the acts of dragons? . . . They are wiser than men are. It is with them as with dreams. We men dream dreams, we work magic, we do good, we do evil. The dragons do not dream. They are dreams. They do not work magic: it is their substance, their being. They do not do; they are.
The early bird gets the worm, but the early worm gets the late bird.
The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
The educated person is not the person who can answer the questions, but the person who can question the answers.
The emotional interpretations of such anomalous events grant them significance regardless of their causal account. And if we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive or the riddle unsolved, we should not shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious.
The empathy of useful feedback
The End and the Beginning - poem by Wisława Szymborska
The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of Franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore.
The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it ...
The evolving role and definition of religion/god
The eye sees. The ear hears. The mind thinks. Thoughts are not the enemy, and the mind can be trained.
The fact that modern physics is now making contact with mysticism shows very beautifully the unity and complementary nature of the rational and intuitive modes of consciousness; of the yang and the yin.
The fact that the unconscious prefers avoiding verbal instructions pretty much altogether—even where they would appear to be quite useful—suggests rather strongly that it doesn't much like language and even that it doesn't trust it.
The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.
The firmest security of peace is the preparation during peace of the defenses of war.
The first job of a teacher is to make the student fall in love with the subject... you are a symbol of the subject in the students’ minds.
The First Noble Truth
The flame of a candle half gone may burn just as it did at the beginning, but by now it has burned longer, and it knows something about burning.
The Fool's Prayer - poem by Edward Rowland Sill
The Four Ages of Man - poem by W. B. Yeats
The free lunch is guaranteed to exist if the garbage dump is large enough. Or, if you look at a big enough population long enough, then "almost any damn thing will happen".
The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning.
The future is not what it used to be.
The future is there, looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.
The genius lights on his age like a comet into the paths of the planets, to whose well-regulated and comprehensible arrangement its wholly eccentric course is foreign.
The goal of science is to make the wonderful and the complex understandable and simple but not less wonderful.
The God Who Loves You - poem by Carl Dennis
The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcise the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge... Neither love without knowledge, nor knowledge without love can produce a good life.
The GPS in my car never gets mad at me, no matter how many times I turn to avoid the torn-up, under construction, street she has recommended. She just says, “Recalculating” and directs me to turn right, and then right again, until I am back where she wanted me.
The great challenge of adulthood is holding on to your idealism after you lose your innocence.
The Great Minimum - poem by G. K. Chesterton
The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another.
The great use of ones life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.
The greatest challenge of deliberate practice is to remain focused. In the beginning, showing up and putting in your reps is the most important thing. But after a while we begin to carelessly overlook small errors and miss daily opportunities for improvement. This is because the natural tendency of the human brain is to transform repeated behaviors into automatic habits.
The greatest sign of success for a teacher... is to be able to say, 'The children are now working as if I did not exist.'
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think but thousands can think for one who can see! To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and possibility – all in one.
The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
The hard thing when you get old is to keep your horizons open. The first part of your life everything is in front of you, all your potential and promise. But over the years, you make decisions, you carve yourself into a given shape. Then the challenge is to keep discovering the green growing edge.
The heart of the entrepreneurial spirit, success, and happiness
The heights by great men reached and kept Were not achieved by sudden flight, ...
The highest form of love is the love that allows for intimacy without the annihilation of difference.
The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.
The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
The human brain is the only kind of object capable of understanding that the cosmos is even there, or why there are infinitely many prime numbers, or that apples fall because of the curvature of space-time, or that obeying its own inborn instincts can be morally wrong, or that it itself exists.
The human race will have a new kind of instrument which will increase the power of the mind much more than optical lenses strengthen the eyes...
The Humanities, and especially, art and literature, can help us walk through the soul of others.
The I Ching teaches us: acceptance. It essentially advances this lesson: if we want to use chance operations, then we must accept the results. We have no right to use it if we are determined to criticize the results and to seek a better answer. In fact, the I Ching promises a completely sad lot to anyone who insists on getting a good answer. If I am unhappy after a chance operation, if the result does not satisfy me, by accepting it I at least have the chance to modify myself, to change myself. But if I insist on changing the I Ching, then it changes rather than I, and I have gained nothing, accomplished nothing!
The idea of transmigration has a certain appeal to the imaginative mind if one is not too critical or scientific...
The idea that we can leave something of ourselves, even beyond our knowing, offers a potent answer to those who claim that meaninglessness inevitably flows from one's finiteness and transiency.
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
The imagination is the true fire, stolen from heaven, to animate this cold creature of clay, producing all those fine sympathies that lead to rapture, rendering men social by expanding their hearts.
The importance of a visionary narrative
The important thing to me is not the destination, but the journey. Philippians 3:16 expresses it well: Meanwhile, let us keep in step with the pace we have set.
The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
The Inductive Attitude, or Characteristics of Strong Character
The infinitesimal and the infinite ... they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet — like the closing of a gigantic circle.
The information that comes from millions of years ago, we call brain chemistry. The information that comes from hundreds of thousands of years ago from our hunter and gatherer ancestors we call genes. The information that was handed down thousands of years ago we call religion. The information passed along hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family. The information you absorbed over the past few years (in college) we call education.
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
The intellectual realm is a place of wonder, awe, and insight; a place of deep realities beyond the "small utilities" of ordinary life; and a place where what it means to be a human being is sought out, with however much difficulty and facing however many illusions. It's where awe lives and opinions go to die.
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
The inverse gambler’s fallacy
The inverse law of Optics: the more expensive the glasses, the quicker they get scratched.
The kind of knowing innocence the clown possesses might be called a “second” innocence, one that is learned through the experience of living life, warts and all.
The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.
The last shirt has no pockets.
The last step depends on the first... but also, The first step depends on the last.
The last words spoken on the Moon
The life expectancy of this [a high quality item] is as long as you take care of it.
The Light of Interiors - poem by Kay Ryan
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.
The longer I live, the more I realize that real strength has much more to do with what is not seen. Real strength has to do with helping others.
The Lost Tools of Learning
The lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.
The main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of imagining what it’s like for someone else not to know something that you know.
The main obstacle to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.
The Many returning to and embracing the One is Good, and is known as wisdom; the One returning to and embracing the Many is Goodness, and is known as compassion.
The map is not the territory.
The Marks - inspired by Borges
The meaning and value of our own lives depend on their being situated in an ongoing flow of generations. Humanity’s extinction soon after we ourselves are gone would render our lives today in great measure pointless.
The meaning of human existence cannot be explained until “just is" is replaced with “just is, because."
The Meaning of Life - by Terry Eagleton
The measure of a narrative’s ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’ is in its consequences: Does it provide people with a sense of personal identity, a sense of community life, a basis for moral conduct, explanations of that which cannot be known? . . . without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention.
The Median Isn't the Message by Stephen Jay Gould
The meek inherit the cosmos...
The message of the summoned life is that you don’t need to panic if you don’t yet know what you want to do with your life. But you probably want to throw yourselves into circumstances where the summons will come.
The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.
The meteoric passage of humankind through cosmic history has left a brilliant trail. Call it history, call it culture. We came from somewhere and we are tending somewhere, and the spectacle is glorious and portentous. The study of our trajectory would yield insight into human nature, and into the nature of being itself.
The mind of man is more intuitive than logical, and comprehends more than it can coordinate.
The mind ought sometimes to be diverted that it may return to better thinking.
The moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity.
The monk and the boat
The Monkey - poem by Shel Silverstein
The more helpful our phones get, the harder it is to be ourselves. For everyone out there fighting to write idiosyncratic, high-entropy, unpredictable, unruly text, swimming upstream of spell-check and predictive auto-completion: Don't let them banalize you. Keep fighting.
The More Loving One - poem by Auden
The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are.
The more you dwell in the past and future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.
The most astonishing fact of human life is that most of us think it’s possible to minimize and even eliminate suffering. We actually think this, which is one reason why it’s so difficult for us when we’re suffering...
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead — his eyes are closed.
The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!", but "That's funny...".
The most important of all limitations on knowledge–creation is that we cannot prophecy: we cannot predict the content of ideas yet to be created, or their effects. This limitation is not only consistent with the unlimited growth of knowledge, it is entailed by it.
The most important thing to know about "god’s-eye" viewpoint is that it does not exist. In reality, there is no such thing as the third-person view.
The most important thing to understand: The choice of programming language is far from the most important thing in designing a course...For a course, what you want is a crystal-clear language that highlights the computer science ideas without hiding them in a cloud of syntax or library details.
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in. We're computer professionals. We cause accidents.
The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have.
The motto in many projects seems to be: Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow.
The mounted horse did not kill athletics. We run for joy.
The mystery of being is a permanent mystery, at least given the present state of the human brain.
The Nap Taker - poem by Shel Silverstein
The nascent thought has of immediately taking up the expiring thought and 'adopting' it.
The nature of reality - per Philip K. Dick, Marcelo Gleiser, Carl Sagan
The Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers
The Niagara River - poem by Kay Ryan
The Ninth Elegy - poem by Rainer Maria Rilke
The novel requires as its premise that we do not fully understand each other. The moment we fully understand each other and have no secrets is the end of literature, certainly the end of the novel. But the clear seventeen-syllable statement of how things are, the haiku, will remain the only literary form worth writing.
The oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.
The odds against life as we know it happening to you (and me) are literally and figuratively “astronomical.”
The Odyssey, is a poem about a hero who’s so good at lies, at deceits and disguises, that, once he finally gets home, he has a difficult time proving that he is who he says he is. What is the “self,” exactly? Do you remain “yourself” even after undergoing radical transformations, physical and mental?
The only difference between a probabilistic classical world and the equations of the quantum world is that somehow or other it appears as if the probabilities would have to go negative.
The only difference between the so-called saint and the so-called sinner is that the former is vastly older than the latter.
The only place where things were actually real was at this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you.
The only programmer to whom you should compare yourself is the programmer you were yesterday.
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen all at once.
The only thing more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack is finding a needle in a needle-stack.
The only thing worth pondering on and being mindful of is the human heart in conflict with itself.
The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.
The only way forward is to recognize that your own selfishness is the only selfishness you can control; your self-centeredness is the problem here. Love is an action, not just an emotion, and the marriage will only thrive if both people in it make daily sacrificial commitments to each other, learning to serve and, harder still, be served.
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.
The opposite of depression is not happiness -- it is human vitality.
The optimism bias becomes self-fulfilling. Once people believe in a better future – for themselves and others – they become willing to take risks, work hard, sacrifice near-term comfort, delay gratification, and cooperate with others, all of which are the raw ingredients of economic and social progress.
The ordinary + extra attention = the extraordinary
The ordinary traveler, (going on) the beaten route... without himself doing anything or risking anything, does not need to show much more initiative and intelligence than an express package... He and his valise are carried in practically the same fashion; and for each the achievement stands about on the same plane.
The overarching purpose of schooling is to stimulate, capitalize on, and sustain the kind of motivation, intellectual curiosity, awe, and wonder that a child possesses when he or she begins schooling.
The paradox of concentration: We concentrate when we want to and when we must, rarely just because we can; and yet when we try to concentrate, we risk missing the point – our will becomes another element of consciousness to hold and tame, and we risk getting in our own way.
The part of reality that we can make meaningful claims about is limited by our experience and observation. This is a Big Idea that tends to deflate other Big Ideas.
The past can only be known, not changed. The future can only be changed, not known. The only way to predict the future is to make sure it stays exactly the same as the present.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
The pattern using system is a very efficient way of handling information... Insight and humour both involve the restructuring of patterns. Creativity also involves restructuring but with more emphasis on the escape from restricting patterns. Lateral thinking involves restructuring, escape and the provocation of new patterns.
The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.
The person who knows HOW will always have a job. The person who knows WHY will always be that person's boss.
The person who lives without folly is not as wise as he thinks.
The personal and the temporal is where we all begin. Even Spinoza began by being only himself. The question is whether that is where one ought to end. Spinoza tells us no. He urges one to forsake, in a sense, one’s own temporal identity as it has passively come down to one through the contingencies of what he calls “external causality,” contingencies that have nothing to do with one’s own true essence.
The plan is nothing; the planning is everything.
The plane of life is a frozen sea, on which all make many slips, and finally break through into eternity.
The poem . . . is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.
The point is not to show that physics is confirming the truths of Buddhism. That will never happen, nor should it... there may be perspectives in the long history of Buddhist philosophy that prove fruitful for physicists pushing at their own frontiers — the places where we are stuck, or hitting paradoxes.
The point of liberal education is to learn something about everything, and everything about something.
The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.
The postmodern belief that discarded ideas mean that there is no objective reality and that all theories are equal is more wrong than all the wrong theories combined.
The potentially nice thing about artificial intelligence is that it's possibly better than natural stupidity.
The power of poetry :)
The power of statistics
The price of metaphor is eternal vigilance.
The Principle of Induction states that if something x has happened in certain particular circumstances n times in the past, we are justified in believing that the same circumstances will produce x on the (n+1)th occasion... But the conclusion, abstract as it is, seems inescapable: What justifies our confidence in the Principle of Induction is that it has always worked so well in the past, at least up to now. Which would seem to mean that our only real justification for the Principle of Induction is the Principle of Induction, which seems shaky and question-begging in the extreme.
The principle of logical parsimony and media commentary
The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality. Ego is constantly attempting to acquire and apply the teachings of spirituality for its own benefit.
The problems in the text have the dignity of solving a crossword puzzle - hard to be sure, but the result is of no significance in life.
The process of learning through life is by no means continuous and by no means universal. If it were, age and wisdom would be perfectly correlated, and there would be no such thing as an old fool -- a proposition at odds with common experience.
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.
The proper recipe for remaining young: If you have wide and keen interests and activities in which you can still be effective, you will have no reason to think about the merely statistical fact of the number of years you have already lived, still less of the probable shortness of your future.
The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.
The Purpose of Computing Numbers Is Not Yet in Sight.
The purpose of life is not to be happy—but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.
The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.
The Queen has some fun :)
The Queen starts reading
The question is not what you look at, but what you see.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
the questions raised by thinking and which it is in reason’s very nature to raise — questions of meaning — are all unanswerable by common sense and the refinement of it we call science. The quest for meaning is “meaningless” to common sense and common-sense reasoning because it is the sixth sense’s function to fit us into the world of appearances and make us at home in the world given by our five senses; there we are and no questions asked.
The quickest way to double your money is to fold it over and put it back in your pocket.
The rain here has a curiously penetrative quality which makes ordinary rain seem almost arid.
The rationality of our universe is best suggested by the fact that we can discover more about it from any starting point, as if it were a fabric that will unravel from any thread.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
The really unusual day would be one where nothing unusual happens.
The reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.
The reason most people never experience this simplicity (on the other side of the complexity curve) is that they confuse learning and understanding with what is happening in School and University; topics are taught in a way that only ever increases the complexity of mental models and just a small minority of people experience this other side of complexity.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.
The relation between minds and machines, and the combination of delight and despair we find in their collisions, leads you to a broader thought: at any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity.
The Road Ahead, or the Road Behind - poem by John Wooden
The Road Not Taken - poem by Robert Frost
The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain and easy to express. Err, and err, and err again, but less, and less, and less.
The road, one felt, had to go somewhere. This geographical fiction has been the death of many people. Roads don’t necessarily have to go anywhere, they just have to have somewhere to start.
The root of joy is gratefulness...It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
The same free flow that makes information cheap and reproducible helps us treasure the sight of information that is not. A story gains power from its attachment, however tenuous, to a physical object. The object gains power from the story. The abstract version may flash by on a screen, but the worn parchment and the fading ink make us pause. The extreme of scarcity is intensified by the extreme of ubiquity.
The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.
the scene with the Cheshire cat
The School Where I Studied - poem by Yehuda Amichai
The Scientific Bubble
The search for the impossible is part of what intelligence is about.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all energy systems run down like a clock and never rewind themselves. But life not only 'runs up,' converting low energy sea-water, sunlight and air into high-energy chemicals, it keeps multiplying itself into more and better clocks that keep 'running up' faster and faster.
The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.
The secret to a long life is simple: choose the right parents.
The self is merely a shadow cast by grammar.
The self is never to be found, but must be created, not the happy accident of passivity, but the product of a thousand actions, large and small, conscious or unconscious, performed not “away from it all,” but in the face of “it all,” for better or for worse, in work and leisure rather than in free time.
The Seven Deadly Sins: Wealth without work; Pleasure without conscience; Knowledge without character; Commerce without morality; Science without humanity; Religion without sacrifice; Politics without principle.
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
The sight of a book you’ve read can remind you of the many things you’ve already learned. The sight of a book you haven’t read can remind you that there are many things you’ve yet to learn. And the sight of a partially read book can remind you that reading is an activity that you hope never to come to the end of.
The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
The Six Stages of Debugging
The sound of the ocean is the sound of time passing, the sound of one moment giving way to the next. Each wave, each moment, is a gate that I pass through into the next moment.
The Sounds of Silence - John Cage’s ' 4’ 33” ' masterpiece
The spirit, like the body, can be strengthened and developed by frequent exercise. Just as the body, if neglected, grows weaker and finally impotent, so the spirit perishes if untended.
The spiritual teacher is both ordinary and extraordinary. And so are we.
The standard justification of scientific induction is itself inductive. We expect the future to be like the past in certain ways only because past futures have been like past pasts in these specific ways.
The striking paradox is that science tells us both that we’re peripheral in the cosmic scheme of things and that we’re central to the reality we uncover. Unless we understand how this paradox arises and what it means, we’ll never be able to understand science as a human activity.
The Strong Are Saying Nothing - poem by Robert Frost
The struggle of a writer is unavoidable, whether a beginner or an established one. The first one struggles because of lack of words, and the second because of plenty.
The sunflower keeps its eye on the sun with its back turned to the shade. We die facing life with our backs to death, as if we were walking out of a room backwards.
The superficial and slipshod have ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any part of it in a bland generalization.
The task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is flat pretending to be round. (A round character) has the incalculability of life about it—life within the pages of a book.
The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority.
The test of interesting people is that subject matter doesn't matter.
The test of what is right in politics is not the will of the people, but the good of the people.
The theater worried her. It had a magic of its own, one that didn’t belong to her, one that wasn’t in her control. It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn’t belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn’t know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better.
The thing about coincidence is that when you imagine the umpteen trillions of coincidences that can happen at any given moment, the fact is, that in practice, coincidences almost never do occur. Coincidences are actually so rare that when they do occur they are, in fact memorable. This suggests to me that the universe is designed to ward off coincidence whenever possible—the universe hates coincidence—I don't know why—it just seems to be true. So when a coincidence happens, that coincidence had to work awfully hard to escape the system. There's a message there. What is it? Look. Look harder.
The thing about people who understand you is that when they are gone, you can still visit them, and they still understand you.
The thing about the past is that it’s not the past.
The thing that defines a human being is being a human.
The thing that differentiates scientists is purely an artistic ability to discern what is a good idea, what is a beautiful idea, what is worth spending time on, and most importantly, what is a problem that is sufficiently interesting, yet sufficiently difficult, that it hasn't yet been solved, but the time for solving it has come now.
The thinker is a thought among thoughts; the feeler is a feeling among feelings.
The third law of Artificial Intelligence states that any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently, while any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will be too complicated to understand.
The Third-and-a-Half Noble Truth
The thought manifests as the word. The word manifests as the deed. The deed develops into a habit, and the habit hardens into character. So watch the thought and its ways with care, And let it spring from love, Out of respect for all beings.
The three laws of thermodynamics
The time to question your luck is not when everything seems out of whack but when everything seems to be in perfectly normal whack.
The timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness, And knows that yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream.
The Trojan War explained...
The trouble was that I failed to record so much. I’d write about a few moments, but the surrounding time — there was so much of it! So much apparent nothing I ignored, that I treated as empty time between the memorable moments.
The trouble with socialism is socialism; the trouble with capitalism is capitalists.
The true measure of a painting, she said, was how good it was, not the accuracy of the signature in the corner. Can a forgery not give as much pleasure as an original? Isn’t there a point when fakes become more authentic than originals? And anyway, isn’t the real scandal the market itself?
The true sage is not he who sees, but he who, seeing the furthest, has the deepest love for mankind.
The true triumph of reason is that it enables us to get along with those who do not possess it.
The truth is a matter of the imagination.
The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.
The truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do.
The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M. C. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are too small for a full-sized human to enter.
The truth is that, whatever happens after death, it is possible to justify a life of spiritual practice and self transcendence without pretending to know things we do not know.
The two cultures: Maybe you can write — but can you code?
The two powers which in my opinion constitute a wise man are those of bearing and forbearing.
The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education.
The ultimate metaphysical secret, if we dare state it so simply, is that there are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality. And while it is fine to map out the territory, it is fatal to confuse the two.
The ultimate perfection of patience does not come from endurance or a re-evaluation of a situation. Rather it comes from the absence of our habitual, automatic triggers and reactive hooks to the challenges of life. Fully mature, patience is effortless. It is not a doing at all.
THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE - according to Sir Terry
The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining?
The Universe - poem by May Swenson
The universe may be as great as they say. But it wouldn't be missed if it didn't exist.
The upside is that, the more confusing technology becomes, the more comfortable I am with death.
The use of the pot is where the pot is not. A poem of the right shape will hold a thousand truths. But it doesn’t say any of them.
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
The Verdeutschung of the Bible and creating the teitsh ḥumesh
The very thing about people that makes the human race interesting is also the thing that makes it so hard to get anything done without the most horrible confusions: no two people think exactly the same way about anything.
The virtue of forbearance: just holding on for dear life is what makes life dear.
The vociferous catastrophes of a general order — fires, wars, epidemics — are one single pain, illusorily multiplied in many mirrors... and yet ... Our destiny… is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad.
The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it — right or wrong — may be given.
The way we deal with loss shapes our capacity to be present to life more than anything else. The way we protect ourselves from loss may be the way in which we distance ourselves from life.
The way we miss our lives is life.
The Weak and Strong Anthropic Principles
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.
The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self.
The wider our sense of the universe, also the more wonderful our sense of the universe. These things like dark energy—that just seem like metaphors! We've uncovered phenomena that must be absolutely integral to the being of the cosmos itself, and at the same time are so inaccessible.
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
The wise programmer is told about Tao and follows it. The average programmer is told about Tao and searches for it. The foolish programmer is told about Tao and laughs at it. If it were not for laughter, there would be no Tao.
The Wonderful Pen - poem by May Swenson
The word (God) carries with it awe and reverence. If we can transfer that awe and reverence ... to the stunning reality that confronts us, we will grant permission for a renewed spirituality, and awe, reverence and responsibility for all that lives, for the planet.
The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice.
The world is astonishing. But “astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn’t based on comparison with something else.
The world is made up of four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. This is a fact well known to everyone. It’s also wrong. There’s a fifth element, and generally it’s called Surprise.
The world is much more interesting than any one discipline.
The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
The world of pure mathematics is inexhaustible; no finite set of axioms and rules of inference can ever encompass the whole of mathematics; given any set of axioms, we can find meaningful mathematical questions which the axioms leave unanswered.
The Zen of Python
Theodor Herzl
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Schick
Theodore Zeldin
theologian
There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.
There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.
There are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in a human language. We can be compelled to recognize the existence of such facts without being able to state or comprehend them.
There are four ways of answering questions: One way was categorically—simply to say yes or no without ambiguity. The second way was to examine the question analytically, clarifying definitions of terms, trying to determine what was actually being asked, usually by deconstructing the question. Most of the time when the Buddha employed this method, there was no need to answer the question: under analysis the question proved meaningless. The third way was by posing a counterquestion, whose purpose was to bring the questioner back to his or her own mind, redirecting attention away from the entanglement of the language of the question to something real that stood behind it. The fourth way was simply by putting the question aside, because some questions are so hopelessly entangled that to take them up on any terms at all would be to get stuck in them like flypaper—which doesn’t help.
There are lots of good things about getting old, though at the moment I’m forgetting what they are.
There are more things in heaven and earth… than are dreamed of in your philosophy. The phrase can get us places. Not as a taxi to the end of thinking, but as a passport to exploration.
There are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to a certain level of intelligence. Move the smallest bit upwards [in level of intelligence], and some problems will suddenly move from “impossible” to “obvious.” Move a substantial degree upwards, and all of them will become obvious.
There are no tools that cannot be dropped, reimagined, or repurposed in order to navigate an unfamiliar challenge. Even the most sacred tools. Even the tools so taken for granted they become invisible.
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
There are patterns to life . . . Rhythms. It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living. I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.
there are promising engineers, and there are old engineers, but there are no promising old engineers - they don’t make promises!
There are sequential decision-making problems for which there is no optimal stopping rule... The math shows that you should always keep playing. But if you follow this strategy, you will eventually lose everything. Some problems are better avoided than solved.
There are tears in the nature of things, and death affects the mind.
There are things known, and things unknown, and in between are the Doors.
There are thousands of books on happiness, and most of them start by asking what happiness really is. As readers quickly learn, this is approximately equivalent to beginning a pilgrimage by marching directly into the first available tar pit, because happiness really is nothing more or less than a word that we word makers can use to indicate anything we please.
There are two things of which a man cannot be careful enough: of obstinacy if he confines himself to his own line of thought; of incompetency, if he goes beyond it.
There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it, and when he can.
There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.
There are two ways of looking at things: picking out what’s unique, and being attentive to what’s recurring. The news is based on the former, philosophy on the latter.
There are usually thought to be three positions on the matter of God’s existence: “I believe that God exists” (theism); “I don’t believe that God exists” (atheism); and “I can’t tell for sure whether God exists” (agnosticism). A proposed fourth claim is: “Huh?” (namely, define God, please).
There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.
There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there.
There is a crack in everything; That’s how the light gets in.
There is a gap between what we want and what we can have, and that gap ... is our link, our connection, to the world.
There is a kinship between all things, especially between poets and mathematicians, and poets and philosophers, who are a measure of poets, I should say.
There is a logical explanation for everything, often mistaken for the reason it happened.
There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath.
There is a peculiar arrogance in the widespread assumption that culture is what makes humans different from other creatures: We have it and they don’t. But assuming that other animals don’t have culture because they don’t have human culture is like thinking that other creatures don’t communicate because they don’t have human communication.
There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.
There is a strong parallel between language as a sign system and Interface Theory of Perception (ITP). Indeed, language might be considered an interface between humans and their perceptions: an interface of meanings. Alternatively, ITP might be thought of as a system of signs created by our sensory apparatuses: the signs are the objects we perceive, and collectively these signs create systems of meaning. ITP thus might be the basis for a semiotics of perception.
There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces.
There is an art to flying, or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
There is equally as much evidence for God as there is for dragons. But somehow, people regard dragons as silly, whereas they wouldn’t regard the idea of God as silly.
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
There is no afterlife. We just die, and that’s it. Which is why what we do in this life matters so much — and why how we treat others in the here and now is more important than how they might be treated in some hereafter that may or may not exist.
There is no doubt that the selection of topics we address mathematically has played an important role in math's perceived effectiveness. But mathematics would not work at all were there no universal features to be discovered. You may now ask: Why are there universal laws of nature at all? Or equivalently: Why is our universe governed by certain symmetries and by locality? I truly do not know the answers, except to note that perhaps in a universe without these properties, complexity and life would have never emerged, and we would not be here to ask the question.
There is no exercise better for the heart than reaching down and lifting someone up.
There is no hope; but I may be wrong.
There is no life without Earth, but there is Earth without life...
There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
There is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics. (But,) the ugly proofs have their role.
There is no way to happiness, happiness is the way.
There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before.
There is nothing so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness it is in your expecting evil before it arrives!
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
There is rational justification for giving the benefit of the doubt. Following this advice, you should be excited to meet new people and try new things—to assume the best about them, in the absence of evidence to the contrary. In the long run, optimism is the best prevention for regret.
There is something in experience that relates, however inexactly, to benevolence and also altruism. There is something in the nature of most of us that takes pleasure in the thought of a humane and benign social order.
There is such a thing as a clever devil, but not as a super clever devil, because by being a devil, you're taking away the ability to be truly clever in the long term.
There is such a thing as a lightness of thoughtfulness, just as we all know that there is a lightness of frivolity. In fact, thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.
There is such a thing as a universal computer. It means that there is no computation that could be performed by anything in the universe that could not be performed by our computers that are on our desks at the moment, barring only speed and memory capacity.
There may be some good news for humans in the fact that one can be intelligent in many different ways. It gives us hope that we may endow robots with intelligence superior to ours but only in directions that are useful and not threatening to us. Also, it makes it clear that there is no good reason to want to make robots that are exactly like humans.
There must be many exciting properties of matter that we cannot know because we have no way to know them.
There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.
There's a big difference between judgement and discernment.
There’s a difference between the things you value and your actual values. The former come and go. But your values can guide you throughout your life, no matter the situation. In the end, you have a better measuring stick: real failure is failing to live by your values, and real success is taking action every day to embody them.
There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.
There's a myth that learning is for young people. But as the proverb says, "It's what you learn after you know it all that counts." The middle years are great, great learning years. Even the years past the middle years.
There’s a worry that somehow artificial intelligence will become superpowerful and develop goals of its own that aren’t the same as ours. One thing that I’d like to convince you of is that I believe that’s starting to happen already. We do have intelligences that are superpowerful in some senses, not in every way, but in some dimensions they are much more powerful than we (individuals) are, and in other dimensions much weaker. The interesting thing about them is that they are already developing emergent goals of their own that are not necessarily well aligned with our goals, with the goals of the people who created them, with the goals of the people they influence, with the goals of the people who feed them and sustain them, goals of the people who own them.
There's no story that's the start of itself, any more than a child comes into the world without parents.
There's nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.
There’s reading and then there’s reading. There is the gleaning or browsing or cherry-picking of information, and then there is the deep immersion in constructed textual worlds... These are the books that possess one and the books one wants to possess.
Thesaurus - poem by Billy Collins
These (modern, digital) technologies, and the interconnected world and economies they've given us, have actually given us the tools, for the first time as a species, to think and act as a species.
They are not just clueless, they are dynamically anticlueful.
They Are Rivers - poem by Jorge Luis Borges
They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway [...] All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.
They were on the other shore
Thich Nhat Hanh
Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of few perceives what has been carefully hidden in the recesses of the mind.
Things have been, says the legal mind, and so we are here. The creative mind says we are here because things have yet to be.
Things or objects are part of the objective world. They’re inanimate; spiritless. They’re dead. This is not true of chaos and order. Those are perceived, experienced and understood (to the degree that they are understood at all) as personalities
Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!
Thinking is the negotiation of relationships between our noisy representations inside our heads and "what's out there".
This is a wonderful day. I’ve never seen this one before.
This is also fit for humans (or: this is on a human scale; or: this, too, is in the human realm.)
This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.
This is the paradox of vision: Sharp perception softens our existence in the world.
This is the strangest of all paradoxes of the human adventure; we live inside all experience, but we are permitted to bear witness only to the outside. Such is the riddle of life and the story of the passing of our days.
This isn’t life in the fast lane, it’s life in the oncoming traffic.
This narrative sequence (in the first chapters of Genesis) establishes a profound and essential assertion of the sacred good, making pangs and toil a secondary reality, likewise the punitive taking of life. This construction of reality, absolute good overlaid but never diminished or changed by temporal accommodations to human nature, allows for faithfulness to this higher good. Grace modifies law. Law cannot limit grace.
This one is from The (Divine) Book. You don’t have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book.
This passion of our kind For the process of finding out Is a fact one can hardly doubt, But I would rejoice in it more If I knew more clearly what We wanted the knowledge for, Felt certain still that the mind Is free to know or not.
This TiddlyWiki modifications
This too shall pass
This University recognizes no real antagonism between literature and science, and consents to no such narrow alternatives as mathematics or classics, science or metaphysics. We would have them all, and at their best. To observe keenly, to reason soundly, and to imagine vividly are operations as essential as that of clear and forcible expression; and to develop one of these faculties, it is not necessary to repress and dwarf the others.
This world is the only thing we've ever seen and yet it staggers us. It surprises us. We are surprised by what is "the case", "the case" being everything around us.
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Arnett
Thomas Edison
Thomas Fuchs
Thomas Fuller
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Lynch
Thomas Mann
Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton on Solitude, Authenticity and Being
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Schneider
Thomas Woods
Those who believe an argument to be false may much more easily find the fallacies in it than men who consider it to be true and conclusive. … The more the adherents of an opinion turn over their pages, examine the arguments, repeat the observations, and compare the experiences, the more they will be confirmed in that belief.
Those who believe in the afterlife will never be disappointed. That's because if they're wrong, they'll never know about it.
Those who dare give nothing, Are left with less than nothing.
Those who wish to think of the devil might analogously define him as the unfortunate length of time the process takes.
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.
Thoughts on a station platform
Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.
Three key capacities are necessary to subjugate history and, more generally, knowledge under the needs of life: the suprahistoric capacity to synthesize and unify, the unhistoric capacity to forget and repress, and the historic capacity to record and remember...
Threshold - poem by Howard Nemerov
Threshold - poem by Maggie Smith
Through no fault of our own, and by dint of no cosmic plan or conscious purpose, we have become, by the grace of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We have not asked for that role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.
Thus what we gain is Something, yet it is by virtue of Nothing that this can be put to use.
Tiago Forte
TiddlerWiki Formatting Cheatsheet
Tikkun Olam
Tim Hawken
Tim Peters
time
Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live.
Time cannot be literally redeemed or reversed; we cannot go back to the time before the terrible things were done, before we did the terrible things; at the time we meant to do what we did, whatever the consequences may have been. But the question upon which second chances rely is this: What kind of conversations can our ineradicable guilt make possible, or even inspire? Conversations both with ourselves and with others; second chances are made with words.
Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once … and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.
Time flies when you're having fun, or as Kermit the Frog would say, time's fun when you're having flies.
Time is a reality confined to the instant and suspended between two voids. Although time will no doubt be reborn, it must first die. It cannot transport its being from one instant to another in order to forge duration. The instant is already solitude… It is solitude in its barest metaphysical value.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
Time is now fully recognised to be a precious resource even though we have far more of it today than ever before.
Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.
Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past...Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.
Time: I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me.
timelineCreated
Timothy Keller
To achieve the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.
To ask the hard question is simple, The simple act of the confused will. But the answer Is hard and hard to remember.
To Be a Person - poem by Jane Hirshfield
To be alive is to marvel at the Rube Goldberg machine of chance and choice that makes us who we are.
To be an apikores (heretic) is understandable, but to be an am ha’aretz (ignoramus) is unforgivable.
To be genuinely confused about something for even a few seconds is good because it opens us up to the idea that that which we know right now is not complete.
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity.
To be human is to see in the rest of nature not what it is but what we are. If we are lucky enough, if we are wakeful enough, we might see both — but never only reality unselved. Because we are the seeing, we are also the seen — this is the price of consciousness.
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man. The gesture characteristic of his tribe consists in looking at the world with eyes wide open in wonder. Everything in the world is strange and marvelous to well-open eyes.
To become rational, believing only what we have good grounds for believing, is to transform the self so substantially as to change its very identity. ... to the extent that we are rational, we, all of us, partake in the same identity.
To carry the self forward and cultivate the 10,000 things is delusion; to let the 10,000 things come forward and cultivate the self is enlightenment.
To David, About His Education - poem by Howard Nemerov
To do nothing is often the best course of action, but I know from personal experience how frustrating it can be. History was not made by those who did nothing.
To dream of the person you would like to be is to waste the person you are.
To drink is a small matter. To be thirsty is everything.
To err is human (and/but mess-ups can be caused by non-humans too!)
To err is Human; to Forgive, Divine.
To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.
To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. 'Tis much better to do a little with certainty, and leave the rest for others that come after you, than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of anything.
To fall for the illusion that vast computational systems “who” have never had a single experience in the real world outside of text are nevertheless perfectly reliable authorities about the world at large is a deep mistake, and, if that mistake is repeated sufficiently often and comes to be widely accepted, it will undermine the very nature of truth on which our society—and I mean all of human society—is based.
To give one line, or even one word of teaching is "dana prajna paramita."... Actually, to give one line of the teaching may be to make a ferryboat for someone!
To give your sheep or cow a large spacious meadow is the way to control him.
To hold your breath is to lose your breath.
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.
To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance.
To my children: Never make fun of having to help me with computer stuff. I taught you how to use a spoon.
To open our eyes and our hearts is painful. There is a great deal of pain in seeing life as it truly is. And there is a great deal less suffering.
To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.
To put it bluntly, the claim that there’s nothing but physical reality is either false or empty.
To reach your goal this advice is sound: If you can’t go over or under, go round!
To summon grace, say, "Help," and then buckle up. Grace finds you exactly where you are, but it doesn't leave you where it found you.
To teach is to learn twice.
To those who say that we need weights and measures in order to enforce accountability in education, my response is, yes, of course we do, but only under three conditions that are not being met today...
To try and fail is at least to learn; to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have been.
Today I escaped anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions — not outside.
Today is yesterday's pupil.
Today was a good day
Todd May
Todd Shy
tolerance
Tom Robbins
Tom Stoppard
Tom Toles
Tom Wilson
Toni Bernhard
Toni Morrison
Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
Tools do more than extend our bodies: they expand our minds. Technology facilitates ideas that might otherwise be inconceivable.
Tools for living - Phil Stutz
Total Eclipse Experience
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.
True agnosticism consists of the active cultivation of doubt and uncertainty in the face of the mystery of existence. An agnostic stance is not based on disinterest. It is founded on a passionate recognition that 'I do not know.'
Truly original discoveries in science are often triggered by unpredictable and unforeseen small findings ... Scientists are increasingly required to provide evidence of immediate and tangible applications of their work. This is head start fervor come full circle; explorers have to pursue such narrowly specialized goals with such hyperefficiency that they can say what they will find before they look for it.
Trust by BRAVING
truth
Truth comes as a conqueror only to those who have lost the art of receiving it as friend.
Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
Truth is like the moon in the sky. Words are like a finger...
Truth is to be judged on the basis of its practical consequences, on its ability to negotiate and enrich human experience.
Truth, like history and memory, is not a fixed star but a search, an approximation.
Try to be kinder.
Try to choose carefully when the great choices must be made. When you are young, and you have to choose between the life of being and the life of doing you usually leap at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space and a time, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.
Trying to give myself, I see that I am nothing, Seeing that I am nothing, I desire to become, Desiring to become, I begin living.
Trying to make the best of it is (often) going to be a lot better than just putting up with it.
Turn sideways into the light as they say the old ones did and disappear into the originality of it all.
Two Passivists
Unconditional love is free from judgment, fear, impatience, resentment, self-pity, worry and sadness. Since it comes from the heart, it doesn't have any of these overcares generated by the head that can interfere with a relationship and drain it of its fun, vitality and intimacy. Unconditional love is a great concept, but it has to be worked on and refined.
Under One Small Star - poem by Wislawa Szymborska
Understanding — like civilization, happiness, music, science and a host of other great endeavors — is not a state of being, but a manner of traveling.
Understanding is love’s other name.
Unfortunately universities spend all their time filling your head with what’s known, but that’s totally trivial. What’s interesting is what we don’t know. That’s what all the courses should be about, so that maybe the students can come up with new ideas before they’ve been brainwashed with the current paradigms. That would be the university I would create, you know, which only would talk about what we don’t know because what we know is really very uninteresting.
Universal, bullet-proof date format
Unless a poem got refined to a point where not a single word can be replaced by another, that poem resembles a string of colorful beads strung together on a single string. Pearls are strung together carefully, and each one has a unique place in the string.
Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest.
Unless you’re writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author.
Up Late - poem by Nick Laird
Uriah Kriegel
Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin - on Science Fiction
Usually, you know whether you had made the right decision only after the fact/action; but sometimes not even then.
Vaclav Havel
Vanity Card No. 327
vanity of vanities says Ecclesiastes, all is vanity.
Vauvenargues
Venkatesh Rao
Vernon Jordan
Very Human(istic) Advice
Victor Hugo
Vidyamala Burch
View with a grain of sand - poem by Wislawa Szymborska
Vikram Chandra
Viktor Frankl
Virgil
Virgil Quotes
Virginia Woolf
Vision is not enough. It must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs.
Vita Sackville-West
Voltaire
Vowing is liberation from whim and weakness. It creates possibilities that would not occur otherwise, because when you are willing to stick to something, come what may, even if from time to time you don’t feel like sticking to it, a magic arises, and you find yourself feeling and doing noble things you did not know you were capable of.
Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state...
W. H. Auden
W. S. Anglin
W.E.B. Du Bois
Wabi-Sabi: The Art Of Imperfection
Wait, for now. Distrust everything, if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven’t they carried you everywhere, up to now?
Waiting for the Barbarians - poem by Constantine P. Cavafy
Waiting To Go On - poem by David Whyte
Walt Kelly
Walt Whitman
Walter J. Ong
Walter Russell Mead
Walter Savage Landor
Walter Tevis
Wang Ken
War does not determine who is right; it determines who is left.
Washington’s idea of leadership was that first you listen, then you learn, then you help, and only then do you lead. It is a somewhat boring progression, but it’s useful.
Wassily Kandinsky
Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.
Wayne Gretzky
We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.
We all start off the same and we all end up the same, with a brief moment of difference in between. Fertilization to fertilizer. Ashes to ashes. And we spark across the gap.
We are building tomorrow the night before.
We are completely held by the atmosphere in a literal way...We are all connected, molecule to molecule. I'm held by everything that's not me.
We are conscious beings on a quest, a quest that achieves its aims when we use our minds to flourish and to be good. These are our most noble aims. They involve striving to become better, individually and collectively, than we are. Insofar as we aim to realize ideals that are possible but not yet real, the quest can be legitimately described as spiritual.
We are dealing here with a fundamental and almost paradoxical difficulty. Stated briefly, it is that learning is sequential but knowledge is not. A branch of knowledge . . . consists of an intricate network of interrelated facts, each of which contributes to the understanding of those around it. When confronted with this network for the first time, we are forced to follow a particular path,which involves a somewhat arbitrary ordering of the facts.
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.
We Are Here - by David Whyte
We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. [...] Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.
We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books -- a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.
We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.
we are messily slouching towards a non-pastoral utopia on an asymptotic trajectory where reality gradually blurs into magic, waste into wealth, technology into nature and work into play.
We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more in imagination than in reality.
We are never more than one grateful thought away from peace of heart.
We are no longer happy as soon as we wish to be happier.
We are not captives of our tongues, but we are citizens of our languages.
We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it... Life is long if you know how to use it.
We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.
We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.
We are only at the beginning of the development of the human race; of the development of the human mind, of intelligent life — we have years and years in the future. It is our responsibility not to give the answer today as to what it is all about, to drive everybody down in that direction and to say: ‘This is a solution to it all.’ Because we will be chained then to the limits of our present imagination. We will only be able to do those things that we think today are the things to do. Whereas, if we leave always some room for doubt, some room for discussion, and proceed in a way analogous to the sciences, then this difficulty will not arise.
We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.
We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act as if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.
We can have knowledge, and scientific knowledge, that is nothing but conjecture. What constitutes the very existence of science is its status as an ongoing activity. It is ultimately a pattern of thought and behaviour, a style of going about things which has its characteristic norms and values. It does not need any ultimate metaphysical sanction to support it or make it possible ... scientific progress — which is real enough — is like Darwinian evolution. There is no goal for adaptation. No meaning can be given to the idea of perfect or final adaptation. We have reached the present position in the progress and evolution of our knowledge, as we have in the evolution of our species, with no beacon to guide us, nor any goal.
We can interpret what has happened, offer explanations. We can do history, in other words. The boundaries between the sciences and humanities are artificial... we should abandon this bit of cosmic arrogance and face up to the fact that we’re jolly lucky to be here. The history of life is not a source of comfort or moral value. We ought to be strongly suspicious of ideas that are enormously comforting.
We can often insert attention and will and monitor “impulsive impressions” and the quick bodily responses that follow — nip them in the bud — before we yield to them in irrational ways.
We can overcome gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.
We can’t guarantee success, but we can do something better. We can deserve it.
We confuse performance—the ability of a machine to replicate or surpass the results of a human—with method, how those results are achieved. This fallacy has proved irresistible in the domain of higher intelligence that is unique to Homo sapiens.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
We do not experience death. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limit.
We do not experience time flowing, or passing. What we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions ...
We do not grow old no matter how long we live. What I mean is that we never cease to stand like curious children before the great Mystery into which we were born.
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.
We do things all the time...But few of us practice. The key difference between doing and practicing is this: when you are practicing an action, you aren't merely repeating by rote but rather striving to improve or to refine whatever you are doing.
We do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves...
We don't have to be sages or philosophers to understand that what makes us happy is less what we have than what we are.
We dream nonstop until we come to the sleep at the end.
We encourage children to read for enjoyment, yet we never encourage them to “math” for enjoyment. We teach kids that math is done fast, done only one way and if you don’t get the answer right, there’s something wrong with you. You would never teach reading this way.
We enter into each moment holding hands with a future composed of infinite possibilities and a past composed of infinite realities.
We extend our concepts as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.
We find nothing that gives our lives an objective meaning. There’s nothing in the laws of nature to suggest that we have a particular place in the universe. That doesn’t mean I find my life pointless. We can love each other and try to understand the world. But we have to give our lives that meaning ourselves.
We generate consequences, what Easterners would call karma, or to put it in more straightforward terms, we do stupid things: if you don't really know what's going on around you, the actions you take, based on distorted conceptions, based on living in your head instead of in reality, lead to trouble.
We have an odd relationship with words... Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we only have the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.
We have but one death, and it lasts so long!
We have every right to live in gratitude for all the stages of life that brought us here, for all the memories that give us great joy, the people who helped us get this far, the accomplishments we carved on our hearts along the way. These experiences of life cry out to be celebrated. They're no more past than we are. They live in us forever.
We have ideologies and theories which present themselves as an intellectual machine that will pop out an answer for every question they are asked. A universal answer machine is a handy thing to have, and one can understand why so many people derive so much comfort and satisfaction from having them.
We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know.
We have long known that how things seem in the world can be misleading ... and yet ... through sustained introspection, how things seem can be brought into closer register with how they are.
We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.
We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.
We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path...
We have so much to learn if we are ready to look stupid.
We have the ability to experience ourselves as separate from life. We can imagine that life could be or should be different from the way it is. These are illusions, but we experience them as very REAL illusions. None of these beliefs is a problem except that, to the degree we believe them to be true, we suffer.
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.
We humans are both miracles and catastrophes. We must acknowledge both death and joy, horror and awe. It is an astonishment to be alive, and life calls on you to be astonished; but lifelong astonishment will take iron-willed discipline.
We humans, as the philosopher Karl Popper said, can let our ideas die in our place. And that means that we can go through a sequence of ideas that aren't viable, on the way from one viable idea to the next. We don't have to die when they're wrong.
We immediately suppose that the new must also be the important. It isn't always.
We know people in our immediate world who step beyond themselves, into care. If you know them up close, you know they are not saints or heroes — take note of that, and take comfort.
We know that there are facts and insights which we cannot communicate to animals — no animal is familiar, for instance, with the associative law of multiplication… Is it not possible that our understanding of nature also has limitations?
We know the past but cannot control it. We control the future but cannot know it.
We live and learn. Or, at any rate, we live.
We live in an age of exponential growth in knowledge, and it is increasingly futile to teach only polished theorems and proofs. We must abandon the guided tour through the art gallery of mathematics, and instead teach how to create the mathematics we need. In my opinion, there is no long-term practical alternative.
We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.
We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--- it's not useful--- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.
We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
We make a living by what we get; we make a life by what we give.
We make ourselves no promises, but we cherish the hope that the unobstructed pursuit of useless knowledge will prove to have consequences in the future as in the past.
We make, not just to have, but to know.
We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.
We may not always take it for granted that we will get a second chance, and there are many occasions when we will not. But that we may have a second chance makes all the difference in what we do and how we do it.
We move between two darknesses. The two entities who might enlighten us, the baby and the corpse, cannot do so.
we must all hang together, or ... we shall all hang separately.
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
We must believe in free will, we have no choice.
We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject, for both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it.
We need more living portraiture, quieter prophecy, more wisdom literature. We need arguments about education that sing more than they shout. We need more delighted birdwatchers, fewer cool taxidermists.
We need not be afraid to touch, to feel, to show emotion. The easiest thing in the world to be is what you are, what you feel. The hardest thing to be is what other people want you to be
We need not come to the end of the path to experience the benefits of walking it.
We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that the truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes that do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.
We need to reach beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries to create truly cross-disciplinary ways of thinking. It is no longer enough to read Homer and Einstein or Milton and Newton as disjoint efforts to explore the complexities of the world and of human nature. The new mindset proposes that the complexities of the world are an intrinsic aspect of human nature as we experience reality. We cannot separate ourselves from a world that we are a part of. Any description or representation, any feeling or interpretation, is a manifestation of this embedding. Who we are and what we are form an irreducible whole.
We need to think of ourselves as symbionts—intrinsically linked with all other lives, of every species. That connection—inscribed within us genetically—confers a profound responsibility upon us, a responsibility that looks more and more like simple self-restraint.
We never consider that the things dogs know about us are things of which we have not the faintest notion.
We often speak and treat one another as though each of us is the sum of all our past beliefs and actions, nothing added, subtracted or transformed. Perhaps some of the problem is the passion for categorical thinking or rather for categories as an alternative to thinking. Some people evolve and change as dramatically as caterpillars turning into butterflies. Some might as well be carved from granite, carrying whatever beliefs and values they were launched with throughout their life. Some get better, some worse, some stay the same. Some shift as a result of societal changes, some for individual reasons and through individual effort. Recognizing this means having to think about each case and also means recognizing that sometimes we don’t know enough to render judgment. Sometimes we do.
We owe students candor and kindness... Unearned or exaggerated praise, though, isn’t the answer. It can make students believe that they’ve aced something they haven’t and found a calling when they didn’t. That’s not kindness. That’s cowardice. It’s also deception.
We pass through this world but once, so do now any good you can do, and show now any kindness you can show, for we shall not pass this way again.
We resolve to anchor our awareness in our breathing and our body, and we do, to a certain extent, but the more we succeed in focusing our awareness on these things, the more we discover how impossible it is to sustain.
We see a friend’s eye as one and indivisible. A stranger’s eye we take in part by part: the white, the iris, and the pupil.
We seem to either mock or idolize those who seek and enjoy solitude, perhaps because perceiving them as ordinary folks might require us to question the cocoon of noise and artificial light with which we surround ourselves and that constitutes contemporary life.
We seem to remember a gentler, slower, more sensible time... Peering back through history, we see scenes in a kind of slow motion that did not exist then. We have invented it.
We shall never have more time. We have, and have always had, all the time there is.
We should allow ourselves the freedom of being, or living without illusions, plans, worries, expectations, and fear
We should feel awe at the power of this little world to somehow remake time and scale so that we can wander and work and learn and finally grow old, and feel that the dimensions of our lives have been wide indeed.
We should feel awe at the power of this little world to somehow remake time and scale so that we can wander, work, learn and finally grow old and feel that the dimensions of our lives have been wide indeed.
We should not judge our books by their covers; some books exist between covers that are perfectly people-shaped.
We should remember that the idea of the world as composed of weightless atoms is striking just because we know the weight of things so well. So, too, we would be unable to appreciate the lightness of language if we could not appreciate language that has some weight to it.
We should strive to achieve the state where every sufficiently advanced form of work is indistinguishable from play.
We should teach children Computer Science for the same reason we teach them to read and write. Not in order for them to find a job, but in order to raise the level of enlightenment.
We should tell ourselves “You may not wake up tomorrow,” when going to bed and “You may not sleep again,” when waking up.
We should use our opinions to start discussions, not to end them.
We snatch our freeze-frame of life from the simultaneity of existence by holding on to illusions of permanence, congruence, and linearity; of static selves and lives that unfold in sensical narratives.
We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
We take the reasons that people give for their actions and beliefs, and our own reasons for our actions and beliefs, much too seriously... we have a lot of illusions about the role of reasons in our beliefs and decisions. It’s smaller than we think.
We teach math and literature and we don't necessarily expect students to become mathematicians or writers or poets. We should teach computer science without necessarily expecting students to become programmers or computer scientists. But, the moment students decide to take no more computing-related courses they should listen carefully. They might be able to hear the sound of closing doors.
We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
We tend to think of childhood as the realm of memory. It’s an era we recall, whether accurately or not. But this line flips that idea on its head.
We think education is an instrument. We measure what it does. We fret when its utility is seemingly then lost. But we are not instruments, and most things we experience in our life are lost, or idle, not just what we learn in school.
We will be judged twice, once when we die and once when everything we have said or done has had its final effect.
We will never have our flames extinguished by knowledge. The purpose of science is not to cure us of our sense of mystery and wonder, but to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate it.
We're all in the same boat on the sea of suffering.
We're better at stuff because we've figured out how to become better. Talent is not a thing; it's a process.
We’ve been shaped to have perceptions that keep us alive, so we have to take them seriously. I’ve evolved these symbols to keep me alive, so I have to take them seriously. But it’s a logical flaw to think that if we have to take it seriously, we also have to take it literally.
Well, there's one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich.
Wendell Berry
Wendy Lustbader
Werner Herzog
Wernher von Braun
Wes Nisker
What can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli.
What can be said at all can be said clearly; and about that of which one cannot speak, one must stay silent.
What don't die can't live. What don't live can't change. What don't change can't learn.
What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.
What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove's difference and the universe can be on into a whole 'nother song.
What I believe in, what I value most, is transitoriness.
What I do is done in my mind. And what my hands do with it in writing it down is not the same as what the hands of the weaver do with the yarn, or the potter’s hands with the clay, or the cabinetmaker’s with the wood. If what I do, what I make, is beautiful, it isn’t a physical beauty. It’s imaginary, it takes place in the mind—my mind, and my reader’s.
What I found is that wisdom can be found in many places.
What I have basically been doing about the rain is ignoring it, to tell the truth. How I do that is by walking in it. I did not fail to notice that those last two sentences must certainly look like a contradiction, by the way. Even if they are no such thing. One can very agreeably ignore a rain by walking in it. In fact it is when one allows a rain to prevent one from walking in it that one is failing to ignore it.
What I here propound is true; therefore it cannot die; or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will "rise again to the Life Everlasting."
What if There Were No Moon - poem by Rebecca Elson
What if you died, and found yourself face to face with God?
What is a poem? What can a poem be?
What is memory, for a time traveler? A conundrum.
What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.
What is most complete cannot be seen in its entirety, hence it seems deficient. What is fullest cannot be seen in its totality, hence it seems empty.
What is past is prologue.
What is the difference between an applied mathematician and a pure mathematician? An applied mathematician has a solution for every problem, while a pure mathematician has a problem for every solution.
What more evidence do you need?
What people are looking for – rather than what people are merely looking at – determines what is obvious. Obviousness is not self-evident... Humans do a remarkable job of generating questions, expectations, hypotheses and theories that direct their awareness and attention toward what is relevant, useful and novel. And it is these – generative and creative – qualities of the human mind that deserve further attention.
What seems absurd depends on one’s prejudice...Two’s company, but three’s a crowd.
What sets expert practitioners apart is the quality and quantity of their mental representations.
What the hell is water?
What was God doing before He created the world?
What we colloquially call ‘feeling bored’ is just the mind, acting out of a self-preserving reflex, ejecting information it has despaired of knowing where to place (in the 'library of the mind').
What we need are notions, not notations.
What would you do if I died? If you died I would want to die too. So you could be with me? Yes. So I could be with you.
What you call complications are simply another name for life itself. Worry is life, and life is worry. And the absence of worry is death.
What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.
What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.
What's new vs. What's best
What's the difference between a schlimazl and a schlumiel? A schlumiel is the person who spills hot soup in your lap. You are the schlimazl.
What's the difference between a smart person and a wise person?
What's the opposite of deja vu, when you see something that hasn't happened yet? I don't know--avant verrais?
Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.
When a person must cross an exceedingly narrow bridge, the general principle and the essential thing is to not frighten oneself at all.
When Alan Turing was asked when he would say that a machine was conscious, he responded that he would say a machine is conscious when he would be punished for saying otherwise.
When all is said and done, we're really just all walking each other home.
When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.
When fishing for happiness, catch and release.
When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I’m old, I admire kind people.
When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
When interviewing (someone), keep yourself from breaking useful silences by scribbling in your notebook "SU" - for Shut Up.
When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.
When one is considering the universe, it is important, sensible even, to try and find some balance between laughter and uncontrollable weeping.
When our hearts expand, other people's shortcomings don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform.
When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself.
When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
When someone loves you, it means that they want to help you become the best version of yourself.
When the experience of constant correction in scientific research is generalized, it leads into the curious “better and better,” “truer and truer,” that is, into the boundlessness of progress with its inherent admission that the good and the true are unattainable. If they were ever attained, the thirst for knowledge would be quenched and the search for cognition would come to an end.
When the heart is full, the eyes overflow.
When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well.
When the Soviet Union Was Disintegrating - poem by Ursula K. Le Guin
When things "all hang together," you have either gotten the joke, solved the puzzle, argued in a circle, focused your chain of logic so narrowly that you will be blindsided—or discovered a hidden pattern in nature.
When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy. When facts change your mind, that's science.
When trust was in the room, whatever room that was, good things happened. When trust was not in the room, good things did not happen. Everything else is details.
When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves.
When we crave power over life—endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality—then desire becomes greed. And if knowledge allies itself to that greed, then comes evil.
When we look at the world, we do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are. The only thing we ever experience is ourselves. (This is called projection).
When we pray we see that exactly because we have made our best effort and spent ourselves in doing so, we have become sacred. He or she is sacred who come wandering in weariness in these waters, to swim, float, or sink.
When we read or study seriously, ... We may not know in advance how entering a fictional world or considering a philosophical theorem might change us. Learning requires abandonment, the fear of which has to be overcome at the outset.
When we stand up (after sitting Zazen), we are there! That is the first step in creation. When you are there, everything else is there; everything is created all at once. When we emerge from nothing, when everything emerges from nothing, we see it all as a fresh new creation. This is non-attachment.
When we talk about decision-making, we usually focus just on the immediate payoff of a single decision—and if you treat every decision as if it were your last, then indeed only exploitation makes sense. But over a lifetime, you’re going to make a lot of decisions. And it’s actually rational to emphasize exploration—the new rather than the best, the exciting rather than the safe, the random rather than the considered—for many of those choices, particularly earlier in life.
When you are not disturbed, it's only because you are not disturbed, not because nothing is disturbing. It is true that nothing is intrinsically disturbing, but as long as you can be disturbed, you can't know that.
When you enter this church it may possibly be able to "hear the call of God". However, it is unlikely that He will call you on your mobile device. So thank you for turning off your phone. If you want to talk to God, you may enter, choose a quiet place and talk to Him. And if you want to see Him, send Him a text while driving.
When you forgive others they may not notice but you will heal. Forgiveness is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves.
When you grow old, the coat of winter feels heavy.
When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books. You will be reading meanings.
When you have trouble making up your mind about something, tell yourself you’ll settle it by flipping a coin. But don’t go by how the coin flips; go by your emotional reaction to the coin flip. Are you happy or sad it came up heads or tails? That is your deepest self telling you what it wants.
When you know a man's religious complexion, you know what sort of religious books he reads when he wants some more light, and what sort of books he avoids, lest by accident he get more light than he wants.
When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
When you live life connected to purpose, you don't have to chase opportunities, they come to you.
When you love your work very much, and you have a bad day, the only way to get out of trouble is to go deeper in.
When you read biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how much luck is involved... So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious.
When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something, you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things. I’ve also learned that patterns of attention — what we choose to notice and what we do not — are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time.
When you're young - when I was young - you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?
Whenever the essential nature of things is analysed by the intellect, it must seem absurd or paradoxical. This has always been recognized by the mystics, but has become a problem in science only very recently.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).
Whenever you have a choice between being right or being kind be kind. No exceptions. Don’t confuse kindness with weakness.
Where death is I am not; where I am death is not, so we never meet.
Where Does Religion Come From?
Where people stand is perhaps not as important as which way they face.
Whether or not honorable behavior is really motivated by people’s imagining a watchful and judgmental impartial spectator, the concept gives us a powerful tool for self improvement... Stepping outside yourself is an opportunity for what is sometimes called mindfulness—the art of paying attention instead of drifting through life oblivious to your flaws and habits.
Which Queen
Which way ought you go from here? That depends a good deal on where you want to get to. If you don’t much care where you get to, then it doesn’t matter which way you go. You’re sure to get somewhere, if you only walk long enough.
While you can learn much by listening carefully to what people say, a great deal more is revealed by what they do not say. Listen as carefully to silence as to sound.
Who are sick and who are not, and what to do about it
Who Does She Think She Is... - poem by Shel Silverstein
Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.
Who says physics should be able to derive the values of the fundamental constants of nature? It may very well be that these values are simply part of the alphabet (or basic/axiomatic assumptions) of physics, measured quantities we use to build our descriptions of natural phenomena.
Why are we here? No why. Just here.
Why collect quotes/anecdotes?
Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension, beginning to end.
Why Is 137 the Most Magical Number?
Why is it that when you transport something by car, it's called a shipment, but when you transport it by ship, it's called cargo?
Why is there so much month left at the end of the money?
Why should I believe in other people's revelations? I have enough trouble believing my own.
Why should I worry about dying? It's not going to happen in my lifetime!
Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.
Wie gut ist es nichts zu tun, und dann ein bisschen auszuruhn.
Wilferd Arlan Peterson
Will AI Achieve Consciousness? Wrong Question. We should not be creating conscious, humanoid agents but an entirely new sort of entity, rather like oracles, with no conscience, no fear of death, no distracting loves and hates.
Will Rogers
Willa Cather
Willard Van Orman Quine
William Blake
William Butler Yeats
William Byers
William F Buckley Jr.
William Faulkner
William Gibson
William Giraldi
William H. Calvin
William James
William Makepeace Thackeray
William Penn
William Shakespeare
William Wordsworth
William Zinsser
Wilson Mizner
Wine Country barrel signs
Winston Churchill
Winter Syntax - poem by Billy Collins
wisdom
Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty. It's not something you do just to advance in life.
Wisdom from a (non) Fool
Wisdom inclines towards the good, but is not attached to it. It shies away from what is not good, but has no aversion to it. Wisdom recognizes the difference between skillful and unskillful, and it clearly sees the undesirability of the unskillful.
Wisdom is hereditary - You get it from your children.
Wisdom is knowing what path to take next. ... Integrity is taking it.
Wisdom remembers. Happiness forgets.
Wise men withdraw from the leadership of the world because they know that there are wiser people than them, and they want the world to be governed by complete sages, meanwhile fools and wicked people jump up and take the world into their own hands and run the world according to their malice and stupidity.
Wislawa Szymborska
With all (your familiar things) taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That's not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.
With every step I do, I go towards you. Because who am I and who are you if we don’t understand one another?
Without error-correction all information processing, and hence all knowledge-creation, is necessarily bounded. Error-correction is the beginning of infinity.
Without music life would be a mistake.
Without resistance or grasping, moments of pain, pleasure or neutral feeling are all just temporary expressions of our aliveness. When this becomes an embodied insight, it’s quite a revelation. It can really turn your life around.
Wolf Erlbruch
Wonder is the heaviest element in the periodic table of the heart. Even a tiny piece of it can stop time.
Wonder. Go on and wonder.
Woody Allen
Words (or bits), by themselves, aren't a good medium for honest signals because they aren't differentially expensive. False and/or low-quality sentences are just as easy to produce as true, high-quality sentences. To gauge honesty and/or quality, we have to look outside the words — to the economics of the process that produces them.
Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.
Words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters...
Words are the wings both intellect and imagination fly on.
Words must surely be counted among the most powerful drugs man ever invented.
Words that seem inspired usually come about the way anything of value comes about: because somebody put in the time and did the work.
Work is love made visible.
Work, at its best, is one of the great human gateways to the eternal and the timeless.
Working Together - poem by David Whyte
Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it empties today of its strength.
Worthwhile ideals (often) have not been tried and found wanting; they have been found difficult and left untried.
Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
writer
Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, will go. For there was a moment where anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.
writing
Writing can be so convincing that I forget for a moment that any object or situation or feeling is always more than what can be said about it. In this way, writing both reveals a truth and conceals a deeper truth. All forms of articulation do that, not just writing.
Writing every day is the only discipline that gets you closer to the 10,000-hour proficiency marker (the reasonably well-accepted theory that to become thoroughly proficient at something, a person needs to practice for about 10,000 hours.
Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.
Writing is our form of DNA for culture, in some sense; it's this digital form that we invent for encoding knowledge. Then we start building machinery to do information processing, systems, everything from legal systems to communication systems and computers and things like that.
Writing's goal is to create clarity with novel ideas and novelty with familiar ones.
Wumen Huikai
Yann Martel
Yehuda Amichai
Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift; that's why they call it the present.
Yogi Berra
Yogi Berra - on everything (and nothing?)
You - you alone will have the stars as no one else has them...In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night...You - only you - will have stars that can laugh.
You are both what you do, and what happens to you.
You are not going to defeat death by identifying with the ego in the steam of time and then trying to make that ego go on forever in that temporal stream. You defeat death by finding that part of your own present awareness that never enters the stream of time in the first place and thus is truly Unborn and Undying.
You are not what you write, but what you have read.
You are perfect the way you are, and you can use a little improvement.
You are where you are today because you stand on somebody’s shoulders. And wherever you are heading, you cannot get there by yourself. If you stand on the shoulders of others, you have a reciprocal responsibility to live your life so that others may stand on your shoulders. It’s the quid pro quo of life. We exist temporarily through what we take, but we live forever through what we give.
You believe what you must in order to stave off the conviction that it's all a tale told by an idiot.
You can complain because roses have thorns, or you can rejoice because thorns have roses.
You can go home again, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
You can have a 25-hour-day. Just go to sleep at your usual time, but wake up one hour earlier than usual.
You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.
You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.
You can not compare this moment with any other, for there are no others. Memories of the past and anticipation of the future are not other moments, but parts of this one.
You can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfillment.
You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
You can say the equations of physics make no distinction between past and future, between forward and backward in time. But if you do, you are averting your gaze from the phenomena dearest to our hearts. You leave for another day or another department the puzzles of evolution, memory, consciousness, life itself. Elementary processes may be reversible; complex processes are not. In the world of things, time’s arrow is always flying.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.
You can't do something to get joy. Joy is what's there when you stop doing everything else.
You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
You can't live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.
You can't love something you don't know anymore than you can love someone you don't know.
You can't really take in life, you can only really give.
You can't take a picture of reality because it's a movie, or a cartoon, depending on your sensibility.
You can't think about thinking unless you think about thinking about something.
You cannot always stay on the summits. You have to come down again… So what’s the point? Only this: what is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above.
You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are.
You cannot imagine how time ... can be ... so still. It hangs. It weighs. And yet there is so little of it. It goes so slowly, and yet it is so scarce.
You cannot propel yourself forward by patting yourself on the back.
You cannot stare straight into the face of the sun, or death.
You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.
You don't have to optimize what you don't write. The most powerful optimization tool in existence may be the delete key. One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.
You don't understand something until you've taught a teenager to teach a computer to do it.
You don't want a million answers as much as you want a few forever questions. The questions are diamonds you hold in the light. Study a lifetime and you see different colors from the same jewel.
You get what you measure
You got to get in the right line. Buy the right ticket. Take that regular commuter train and stay off the express. Stay on the platform with your fellow commuter. You might even want to nod at him. Maybe even say hello. All of them is travelers too.
You have to draw a Circle of Empathy around yourself and others in order to be moral. If you include too much in the circle, you become incompetent, while if you include too little you become cruel. This is the "Normal form" of the eternal liberal/conservative dichotomy.
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, the only way, it does not exist.
You hug them (the raw and wounded) and you say "You were wonderful". You have to say "You", you have to say "were", and you have to say "wonderful".
You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that.
You live, and then you die. You may ask "why?", but the no less important question (and answer) is "how".
You lived; you will always have lived. Death does not erase your life. It is mere punctuation. If only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror. There is your immortality. Frozen in amber.
You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try.
You might as well be a mensch.
You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.
You must be present to win.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it's time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives.
You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
You set yourself afloat on the language.
You should do creative work first. Mindless tasks should go later in the day.
You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts; And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips...
You think when you wake up in the mornin' yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin' else.
You think you KNOW when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.
You too can achieve magic. It may, however, just require you to spend more time than anyone else might reasonably expect.
You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions.
You want fantasy? Here's one... There's this species that lives on a planet a few miles above molten rock and a few miles below a vacuum that'd suck the air right out of them...
you will have to live with your mind every day of your life. So make sure you have a mind that you want to live with... Find things that are beautiful. Expose yourself to them at length. Give them preferential attention.
You will meet a tall dark stranger.
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
You'll probably find that it suits your book to be a bit cleverer than you look. Observe that the easiest method by far is to look a bit stupider than you are.
Young people need models, not critics.
Your children ... are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you...
Your first draft isn’t an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; it’s an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. That’s what directs you during rewriting, and that’s one of the things lacking when you start with text generated by an A.I.
Your job doesn’t have to represent the most prestigious use of your potential. It just needs to be rewarding.
Your life will probably end before everything is well, but you would not have fully lived until you do something to make things better. Said differently, you will not live forever and the work is endless, but you will not have lived significantly until you do some of the work.
Your mind is, was, and will always be a room with a view.
Your stature as a fisherman isn't determine by how big a trout you can catch but by how small a trout you can catch without being disappointed.
Your teachers Are all around you. All that you perceive, All that you experience, All that is given to you or taken from you, All that you love or hate, need or fear Will teach you -- If you will learn.
Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart.
Yutori (spaciousness)
Yuval Noah Harari
Zen Koan: the flag
Zena Hitz
מי האיש - Who is the Man (mi ha ish)